The Ninth Life of Louis Drax
Liz Jensen
Four stars
Bloomsbury, $23.95
The tricky device of having your novel narrated by a dead character is becoming a little tired of late.
What with Alice Sebold’s “Lovely Bones,” Neal Jordan’s “Shade” and Mitch Albom’s ongoing sensation “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” most readers have probably got all the deceased protagonists they can handle on their bedside tables right now. That’s the way the apprehensive reader fears “The Ninth Life of Louis Drax” might be going, until British author Liz Jensen has her deceased 9-year-old hero suddenly hiccup on the mortuary slab.
It’s a startling moment and one which sends Louis, hooked up to life support, on his way to maverick coma-specialist Pascal Dannachet in the tinder-dry South of France, with his anxious mother Natalie in tow.
The celebrated Dannachet believes coma victims are far more conscious than most medics give them credit for, and so the case proves to be with Louis.
As the hot wind blowing over the South of France stokes foul-smelling forest fires, and the story of Louis’s short and accident-filled life is painfully and dramatically revealed, Jensen invites the reader to speculate on the very nature of conscious thought.
All the while, Louis lies in the coma ward with one foot on each side of the perilous line that separates life from death.
And slowly but surely, Louis and Dannachet piece together the macabre nexus of lies, bad faith and betrayal that explain his horrific fall from a cliff during a family picnic.
It is to Jensen’s credit that this unputdownable story rarely strays into hokeyness, focusing instead on a heartbreaking portrait of a precocious little victim with a passion for sea monsters and the evil that man can do in the name of love.