Fiction:Lawrence and his little sister, Jemima, are off to Rome with their mother. We know that Lawrence is a smart boy, because when packing he decides to take his Tintin books rather than his Asterix.
And if the decision to leave seems a little spontaneous, Lawrence is convinced that it's a clever one, given that the three of them have just had to scurry back from the supermarket, nervously keeping an eye out for Lawrence's father, who seems to be stalking his family. Which makes Lawrence's mother, Hannah, "go sad" sometimes, something Lawrence watchfully worries about. And his father is apparently stalking them with intent to harm, for when Lawrence thinks he hears someone approaching as they're packing the car, he looks around for a big stick, and when it turns out that there's no one coming, Lawrence decides "we're safe after all" and takes his mother's hand to stop her scratching her arm.
It becomes clear very quickly in Matthew Kneale's new novel that Lawrence doesn't know as much about his situation as we can infer from his description of it, and that this is a tale told over the head of its narrator. And though he understands that his mother is troubled by an episodic fragility, when it falls to him to work out strategies to rouse her, what Lawrence doesn't know and we soon gather, is that his mother is suffering from some manner of paranoid and delusional mental illness.
The drive to Rome is punctuated by moments of excitement, long hours of sleepy boredom, and, for two days somewhere in northern Italy, Hannah "going sad". This is the sudden onset of a deep, paralysing depression, during which she takes to her bed and remains glassy-eyed and scarily removed. Lawrence keeps things ticking over while he waits for his mother to emerge, looking after his sister and his hamster and reasoning that "I can't get upset too actually or there will be nobody left".
How much you are engaged by this book probably depends on how patient you are with kids like Lawrence. Kneale allows Lawrence to tell the entire story, and it is his child's voice - bright, often petulant, occasionally insightful - that takes us to Rome and back again. On one level this is completely successful - I believed in Lawrence as a character. His voice is skilfully realised, to the extent that I felt I could actually hear it.
On another level, and one possibly necessitated by the first, it's a problem. Because Lawrence, bless him, can be a real pain in the neck. It's not just his doggedly selfish acquisitiveness when it comes to toys, or his cutesy habit of ascribing animal characteristics to adults, or his overuse of the word "actually". It's more fundamental than that. Actually. Because we're trapped in Lawrence's perspective, everything tends to take on the sort of one-dimensional superficial quality that it has for Lawrence. It's difficult to gain much understanding of any of Hannah's friends in Rome with whom the family takes refuge, then argues with, then avoids, and so on. And most importantly, it limits our understanding of Hannah. Yes, we learn that kids say the funniest things, and that they tend to believe what their parents tell them, and that they exhibit a fierce loyalty as their symptom of love. And that when they are hurt and confused, it can be painful to behold. But these are things that are hardly surprising, despite Kneale's skill in portraying them, and we never get more than a childish, sentimentalised account of the illness Hannah is beset by, and which, after all, is at the centre of this story.
Sentiment though, is a powerful weapon, and Kneale wields it without mercy, and if you are in the mood for a tear-jerker, this will probably do the job, though your complicity in the exercise is more necessary here than it might be in a more varied, or a more direct novel. I am as weak as anyone else in the face of frightened, confused children, and I cried at the end. But much like Lawrence or Jemima after a teary tantrum, half an hour later I'd forgotten all about it and was happily doing something else.
Keith Ridgway's most recent novel, Animals, is now out in paperback from Harper Perennial
When We Were Romans By Matthew Kneale Picador, 298pp. £16.99