I must confess my heart sank slightly when I started reading this debut novel, written from the point of view of a cripplingly shy young man whose life is riddled with phobias and obsessions. Since the huge success of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time there has been a steady stream of novels written in the ingenuous tones of a stream of “damaged” and “different” young people. It’s no surprise that such books are popular: they offer, in highly digestible form, the perspective of society’s outsiders. They expand our empathy, make us feel good for taking the side of the underdog – “so good it will make you feel a better person,” said the chair of the Costa judges of Nathan Filer’s overall winner The Shock of the Fall – and doubtless do much to raise awareness and challenge widespread stigma.
Alice and the Fly appears at first to sit squarely in this genre. Schizophrenic Greg suffers from a phobia of spiders, both real and hallucinated. Bullied at school and woefully neglected at home, he becomes entangled in the web of his obsession with Alice, a girl to whom he has never spoken but who has with a single unthinking smile appeared uniquely to acknowledge his status as a fellow human being. The novel takes the form of Greg’s diary entries, interspersed with transcripts of police interviews, which make it clear from early on that something catastrophic has happened. So far, so broadly familiar, but it soon becomes clear that there is far more to James Rice’s writing.
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