It’s reassuring that of Ed Docx’s three admirably eclectic, though sometimes uneven, previous novels, Let Go My Hand most resembles the capacious, Booker long-listed Self-Help. Like that book, this is fiction with heft and moral nuance; a novel that gets its hands dirty in the soiled laundry basket of family secrets and resentments. As such, it’s his most universal, moving and resonant work to date.
Appropriately for a book whose title is taken from Gloucester’s impassioned command to Edgar in King Lear, the story begins at Dover, with the narrator Lou and his 71-year-old academic father Larry (‘one of the prophets of the new literary theory’), about to embark on a road trip in the VW camper van that served during many a fondly recalled childhood holiday. Only it quickly becomes clear that the irascible, mercurial Larry is suffering from motor neurone disease, and their destination is Dignitas in Zürich.
Spellbindingly evoked in the present continuous tense, the road trip that follows takes up the book’s entire length, with the vacillating Lou eventually joined by his feckless half-brothers, twins Ralph and Jack.
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