The Universe Versus Alex Woods is just alright. I can't remember how I came across it or why I decided it would be worth reading - it's been on my Kindle for a long time and I decided to start working through some of the books that have been sitting on there for a while, but I'm not sure why I downloaded it in the first place. Certainly, this 2013 debut work by Lincolnshire's own Gavin Extence has yet to earn much recognition beyond a shout-out by Richard and Judy.
Perhaps it was the plot which, undoubtedly, sounds intriguing on paper. As the book opens, our titular young man has been arrested by the Dover port authorities. His crime? Attempting to transport the ashes of a recently deceased old man and quite a lot of marijuana back into the UK from France. What follows is the story of how he ended up in that situation - beginning some years earlier when he became the second person in history to be hit directly by a meteorite. This event shapes Alex's teenage years - the resulting brain damage leaves him in a coma for two weeks, and with epilepsy for the rest of his life, and despite a few months of positive media attention he becomes something of an outcast at school, having missed so much of his formative time there in recovery. Things aren't helped by the fact that his home schooling comes at the hands of his unconventional mother, who runs a tarot card shop near Glastonbury. Following this period, on the run from his usual tormentors one day, Alex ends up in a chance encounter with a mysterious American widower, Isaac Peterson, and the pair enter an unlikely father-and-son relationship. Extence does well to foreshadow the book's ending/beginning here, as we know that Alex is carrying Mr. Peterson's ashes at the start. And things indeed start to take a much more serious turn as Peterson is diagnosed with a nervous system condition that means he only has a couple more years of increasingly restricted life left. The conclusion is weighty stuff indeed, playing out in Zurich where Mr. Peterson has decided he would like to end his own life with medical assistance.
It's all a good set-up, interspersed with some genuinely good lines about life, death and the things in between that make it all worthwhile, and, funnily enough, a lot of direct and indirect references to the writing of Kurt Vonnegut, whose books start to form a parallel to the events surrounding Alex and Isaac. It's also quite a well-structured coming-of-age story, dealing with all the troubles that teenage life can throw at you. But my main issue with it all has to lie with the writing style - recounting event after event in a positively clinical fashion. The suggestion is that, as it's mostly Alex's interior monologue, we're being given an insight into someone who is likely on the autistic spectrum - but that's not an excuse to sacrifice artistic flair. The likes of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime manage to do a lot more with a lot less, and The Universe Versus Alex Woods falls short in a literary sense by reading almost like non-fiction for the majority of its passages. It makes the insertion of moments of true emotion or perceptive ideas somewhat ham-fisted, and is why ultimately I can't consider this to be on the same level of so many of the other books I've read over the last few years.
The Universe Versus Alex Woods is not a bad book by any means - it makes a lot of good philosophical points and sprinkles them with entertainment, while also approaching an extremely sensitive issue with the respect it deserves - but at the end of the day it has served as a reminder that my ratings system is probably about right.
3.5/5
I'm not a huge fan of Mozart, but I have to say Mr. Peterson does well in choosing this as the last piece of music he ever hears:
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