Smart Alex has a secret

Alex Graham is a precociously smart 12-year-old.He analyses his parents’ every move, and deduces that something’s up. Something’s also up with his pet hamster, Jaws 2, who is in ‘a fugue state’. Alex and Chloe, a school friend, set up experiments to find out. Alex’s brain is on overdrive, and he’s very funny, a trait he inherits from his driving-instructor father. We’ll read a lot of metaphors, he says, because he’s practising his composition for a scholarship to a prestigious middle school.

Alex is so busy with this ambition, his feelings for Chloe and their sleuthing, that he barely notices his seizures, which occur inopportunely, such as when he kisses Chloe at a spin-the-bottle party.

Being a virgin, Alex says, “is like growing up Caucasian in Hertfordshire. You are one long before you know there’s a word for it.” It’s charming how we are bombarded by Alex’s sponge of a brain, which absorbs facts at great speed and connects them in lateral, hilarious ways. His mind rollercoasters from science experiments to porn sites, from French alter egos to using ingenuity to spare him the embarrassment of not knowing ‘cunnilingus’.

His speedy mind and zest for language are conveyed by a multiply-bracketed stream-of-consciousness narrative, which you’ll either love or hate. I loved it.

But I defy anyone to resist the emotional joyride of a teenager coping with hormones and a deadline. He is so consumed by events and emotions that mortality barely registers, but he’s just had surgery for a brain tumour. That is something he keeps very firmly under the hat he wears to cover his baldness. But in his French oral exam, when asked about what he’s going to do in ‘l’avenir’ (the future), he lies.

As with Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Ostrich is narrated by a boy coping with a condition he can’t escape. But Alex is a different character. He empathises with the younger boys being bullied, asks impossible questions of his teachers and challenges the doctor’s metaphor about soldiers charging into battle. He squirms at his father’s humour, and pretends to tie his laces so as not to walk beside his mother to the shops.

Younger readers will identify with his experiences and attitudes, while adult readers will see more than Alex sees. This is a classic case of the unreliable narrator, and the result is both hilarious and heartrendingly poignant. The most powerful aspect of the story is what is not mentioned, and how Alex’s parents treat him. They are magnificent. The character portrayals, revealed mainly through dialogue, are so magic I’m going to reread this book immediately — before I pass it on to my son. Read this, and like. And share.

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