Road trip with real emotional pull
Book club choice Anthony Cummins enjoys a feelgood father-and-sons road trip to Dignitas
Edward Docx is a bit of a chameleon when it comes to fiction. His previous novel, The Devil’s Garden (2011), was a thriller about an English entomologist caught up in corruption in the Amazon – which perhaps wrong-footed admirers of Docx’s Anglo-Russian family saga Self Help, nominated for Booker Prize in 2007. Now comes Let Go My Hand, a slick tear-jerker played for laughs.
Laurence is a Left-wing literary academic who, diagnosed in old age with motor-neurone disease, wants to end his life. The job of driving him from Dover to Dignitas falls to his son, Lou, with his older half-brothers Ralph and Jack also in the car. Among the emotional baggage unpacked en route to Zurich is Laurence’s betrayal of their (now dead) mother for Lou’s, a poet (also dead), whom he seduced on a trip to New York. The action bristles with manic energy. Here’s Ralph grabbing the wheel in France: “‘Bike! Watch that bike!’ ‘He’s seen me.’ ‘Great. But let’s get off the pavement.’”
Docx might have invited us to gawp at Laurence’s degeneration or debate the ethics of assisted dying; instead, he trains our eye on the jostling siblings whose mutual affection is bruised but intact. When sex-brained Ralph hurls a stream of Withnail-like invective at Jack – who is full of needling paeans to monogamy and hands-on fatherhood – we note how differently each bears the stamp of their father’s infidelities.
Much of the emotional pull lies in the question of whether Laurence wants to die or if he’s making a coded plea for forgiveness. As his bewilderment at sat-navs and social media (“Don’t outsource your mind,” he warns) segues into rants about a Britain in which “experts” are “made to feel guilty – guilty – about knowing things!” he gathers symbolic weight, but that doesn’t muddy the feel-good vibe. Ice-veined cynics be warned: get your kicks elsewhere.