sawyl | The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

Needing something light, I picked up Liz Jensen's The Ninth Life of Louis Drax on a 3-for-2, which I seem to remember liking when it was broadcast on R4 a few years ago.

The plot revolves around nine year-old Louis, an odd and unlucky child, who is a coma after almost drowning whilst picnicking in the Auvergne. The exact circumstances of the accident — if that's what it is — are extremely unclear, especially given that Louis' father has vanished leaving his unstable mother the only witness. When Louis is shipped off to a specialist clinic in Provence, Dr Pascal Dannachet finds himself caught up in the mystery as he becomes increasingly obsessed with Mme Drax.

Despite being in a coma, Louis cheerfully shares narrative duties with the doctor and his distinctive voice is one of the novel's strengths. He really comes across a precocious, hyper-verbal child with an extremely flexible take on reality and a knack for saying the most appallingly tactless things to people. There are even a couple of points in the story where Louis' distinctive style is used to identify a handful of damaging letters that appear, however impossibly, to have been sent without the boy ever leaving his coma.

Over all, Louis Drax is a short and generally satisfying read. Although it's possible to guess most of the plot twists ahead of time, probably because Jensen plays extremely fair by the mystery, that doesn't really detract from the enjoyment because a lot of the tension comes Dannachet's complete understanding of his own doom and its inevitability. I particularly enjoyed reading it in the light of having read The Rapture earlier this year. Both books feature some common themes and characters — a disturbed and disturbing child, a damaged doctor who becomes caught up in an obsession despite their better judgment — but each occupies a different genre: Louis Drax is more of a crime novel, whereas Rapture is an unashamed thriller. While each is good in its own way, I think the latter outpoints the former slightly, but on the plus side, it's also shorter — which, seeing as my last book was the wrist-breakingly heavy The Passage, is no bad thing.