Melissa

This exquisitely crafted and haunting novel spirals around the death of a young girl, drawing the reader inexorably to the core – the centre of grief.It opens with a truly fabulous and yet somehow completely believable invention, a musical mass hallucination, experienced by all the residents of Spark Close, at the moment of seven-year-old Melissa’s death. The curiousness of this phenomenon is grounded by the wry, tongue-in-cheek pen-portraits of the varied characters who live in the Close – including a religious evangelist and a sex-worker with twin babies - and we are hooked.The spiral form of the story takes us first through the accounts from those on the outer edges of the tornado – the media pundits, the hangers on, before heading deeper and deeper into the storm.Slowly we circle closer and closer to Serena, the dead girl’s half-sister, whose school friends are completely ill-equipped to deal with her guilt for Melissa’s death; and to her father, Harry, reduced to immobility and silence.The core of the book is deeply moving, but Taylor’s acute ear for dialogue and ironic observation of his characters means the reader is never overcome by darkness. This is a novel full of the light and shade of living.

an unusual yet gripping story with subtle humour and some real heart-rending moments. a clever story that will stay with you long after you have finished reading!

Well written. Not written for the masses.

Every now and then, I sit at my keyboard to write a review and feel as if it's something I've never done before. To match a book that has swept me away and moved me deeply, I feel like I have to step things up a little, make my insights more meaningful, my language a little more carefully chosen, and I become incapable of writing anything at all. So I'm going to keep things simple - I found this book absolutely stunning, and I'm going to concentrate on how it made me feel.There are moments within this book - often linked with intense grief - that I think will remain with me for ever, wonderful moments that moved me to tears. There's a vividly described scene at Melissa's funeral where her father Harold sits with his hands poised over the piano - Melissa's mother Rose trying to understand a specialist's complex explanation of Melissa's illness and the prognosis - another where an argument takes place over the appropriate person to be given the leg of the turkey at dinner - and yet another where two sit side-by-side on a piano stool. In fact, this book overflows with wonderful images - spiders, an illuminated planetarium, the cascade of a spilled bag of oranges, a blank television screen, the shared smile of two co-workers.This is a book with a vast cast of characters in the many and varied residents of Spark Close, every one detailed to an amazing degree, every one entirely real, living and breathing. The phenomenon with which the book opens introduces them all, as they congregate in the street, driven there by their shared experience - everyone, that is, except Melissa's family, who at the moment of her death are isolated by their grief. But I don't want to over-emphasise that grief - although it's the emotion on which the story turns, there are also moments of fun, of real joy, of incidents at which you smile and cringe, and other points where I actually laughed out loud. I said I wasn't going to describe the many characters, but I must mention Kirsten, an absolute tour-de-force - perfectly drawn, probably the one resident you really wouldn't want living next door, but totally mesmerising, both desperately sad and very funny.The way this book is constructed is complex and fascinating - the central part a series of vignettes ("variations" in a musical context) focusing on members of Melissa's immediate family, each one with a musical ebb and flow of its own. The sense of music is so strong that you feel the changes in tempo, volume and mood - the passages that reflect and repeat a theme, the key changes that startle you a little, the occasional pieces played fortissimo, the moments of diminuendo. There are whole chunks of this book that really shouldn't work - the documentary style at its start, the long passages explaining the impact of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, the explanation of entropy in thermodynamics - but they most emphatically do.I won't pretend that I didn't find this book a challenge at times - it's not the easiest of reads for a whole range of reasons, both intellectual and emotional - but once I found myself caught up in its rhythm I just couldn't set it aside. And when I finished reading the simply wonderful coda - the "afterwards" - I had an immense smile on my face and a feeling of absolute satisfaction. Do give it a try.

I'm grateful to have received a copy of this book for review.Melissa is a brilliant read, although by no means always an easy one. Emotionally - and it is above all, I think, an emotional book - it is raw, the hurt of the main characters almost bleeding off each page. They are all - Harry the father, Lizzie the mother, Serena the sister and daughter - living through a nightmare of grief and guilt after the death from leukaemia of seven year old Melissa Comb, lover of spiders, Harry and Lizzie's daughter, and Serena's younger sister.As Melissa dies, a strange acoustic phenomenon envelopes the street where she lives, a discordant and alarming noise that evolves into something like - but not identical to - Elgarian music. The "Spark Close Phenomenon" attracts attention and the Close is plagued thereafter by cranks, New-Agers, neuro-musicologists, musico-neurologists, journalists, hawkers and gawpers whose presence is a continued theme in the book. The irony of the Phenomenon is that it wasn't shared by the Comb family. While others experience a presence, a Thing, the Combs know only absence, a nothing - as concrete an illustration of the "Stop All The Clocks" paradox on the death of a loved one as you can ask for: surely the world must end, bowed by the weight of one's grief? But of course it won't. Harry sees this directly: if only, he thinks, there were an end, as with a piece of music. But life will insist on carrying on."Harry, lost in grief, tries to make an end whether by walking out of his job, locking the piano so Serena can't play it any more, or just sitting:She glared down at him, and he didn't say anything, didn't answer. Instead, he stared straight ahead, at a blank TV screen. For a few seconds, there was a silence between them - a silence which could have ended with his turning round, breaking down, sobbing with her; a silence which could have ended in his quietly taking her hand; a silence which could at least have ended with mutual rage.But it turned out to be a silence which ended with his reaching - slowly, deliberately - for a cracker on the plate next to him, cutting off a little piece of Stilton, and placing it in the centre of the cracker. By the time cracker and cheese reached his mouth - slowly, ever-so-slowly - the door of the living room had slammed shut, and Serena had gone, taking all other possible endings of that silence with her. "He also tries blame, self-loathing and any other emotion that might cut himself off from life, bring an end. As Head of the House, Harry insists on being hurt, refusing to serve up to a guest the turkey leg that is Melissa's favourite part of the bird and seeking comfort from the notorious Ms Kirsten Machin (what really did happen between them? We get different accounts, but there are I think no reliable narratives here). But he isn't alone in his despair, which is shared by Lizzie and Serena: Lizzie needles her stepdaughter, buying the wrong type of milk or hassling her over how her "image" won't help trap a boyfriend: Serena breaks down in class, seeing echoes of Melissa in everything she reads.The story is told from different perspectives, mostly by a narrator, partly by quotes from newspapers (and The Sun), reports, emails, medical diagnoses and other sources. As a result it can circle round its subject, sometimes repeating the same events from a different perspective, or jumping forward or back - and significantly leaving a gap, a Melissa shaped gap, which fills with the aforementioned grief, blame and guilt. And with music: the book is suffused with musical analogies, structures and speculations whether implicit - for example the form of the book is a Prelude, Variations and a Code - or explicit (Serena's conversation with her Physics teacher about music and entropy).It is a powerful story, which is nonetheless very funny in places: the Combs' neighbours provide a degree of relief - though often dark, rather than light, relief - one is a Holocaust survivor, who contributes her own perspective on death and grief, another (Ms Machen) is the subject of a running gag about her babies who are often heard but never seen, a third seems to be a veritable Private Pike but whose mother endlessly goes on about his career in the Territorials as though it made him akin in soldiering terms to the Duke of Wellington: there is also a BNP supporter and a bouncer-turned-Bible basher, all of whom add to the rich tapestry of the novel.It is not, as I said, an easy read, indeed, actually heart rending in places, but still a compelling and deeply human book, going to the heart of the grieving process (I can hear Harry sneering at that - "grieving process" - and taking another cracker).It comes to a resolution... of sorts.Not that there can be a final resolution because, as Harry, again wails, things don't ever stop.