I’M A BELIEVER

Clueless teacher’s girlfriend dies, leading to much misery and soul-searching.

Mark Buckle isn’t really the kind of guy to believe in ghosts, prayer or the whole faith bit. A science teacher at an undistinguished school on the far, unattractive end of south London, Mark sticks to the basics: grousing internally about how crummy his life has been since his girlfriend Catherine died in a car accident. The fact that Catherine’s parents didn’t really like him anyway and that Mark appears to have next to no friends, save Felix, a fellow teacher, doesn’t help matters. Added to Mark’s woes is that Catherine keeps coming back to him, and not just in his dreams. The air in his apartment smells of her perfume, she materializes and speaks when nobody else is around, and every radio he’s near plays their song at the drop of a hat: “Never Tear Us Apart,” by INXS. The ghostly aspects of the tale here are as disconcerting to the reader as they are to Mark: this isn’t the way this kind of book is supposed to go. British author Adams (Tom, Dick, and Debbie Harry, 2002) starts things off with a typical loser’s lament from Mark—he narrates the whole affair—who goes on about his life in a downbeat, humorous, and self-deprecating sort of way. Adams has studied her Hornby well, writing an extremely believable male character from the inside out (something rarely attempted and even more rarely done well by female novelists). But when the other dimensions begin to intrude onto the narrative (which, true, isn’t much more than Mark mooning about and watching football with the extremely gay and, often, extremely drunk Felix), not just with Catherine but with the entrance of Tess, a born-again Christian with feelings for Mark, you start to feel as if you’ve been had.

Skillfully crafted and drolly amusing, but Adams’s second novel never quite manages to marry its twin strings of downbeat sarcasm and airy metaphysics.