Isaac and the Egg by Bobby Palmer review - Cracks open in grief's fragile shell

Isaac is drunk.

He stands alone on a bridge and considers jumping into what he thinks is a raging torrent. In fact, if he actually does jump, he is likely to break a leg on the rough stones, while barely getting wet. He is stopped by hearing a scream from nearby.

At this stage, what started out as a possible story of grief and personal suffering changes to a kind of mixture of childish imaginings and rough retelling of stories about extra-terrestrial beings.

The scream comes from what looks like an unusually large egg which Isaac takes home with him. It moves - slowly - eats lots of rubbish, makes sounds that give the impression it is trying to communicate.

Egg gets a name, indicated by the capital E and is given male gender. In truth, the next two-thirds of the book is mostly childish nonsense as we slowly learn of the reasons for Isaac's troubles.

It turns out that his wife Mary, a young woman from Scotland, has recently died. She was a writer of children's books of which he was the illustrator. They had some success - three books so far - and were settling on a small farm outside London.

Their story gets lost as we read about the troubles Isaac is having with Egg. It would probably help if the reader were au fait with popular stories about ET and mysterious beings. Our two heroes spend a great deal of time watching such movies, while their house and their lives descend into chaos.

This portion of the book probably needs a psycho-someone to explain what is going on, because the truth is that it makes little sense.

It appears that Isaac and Egg become friends and each tries to explain himself to the other, some of the incidents described on the cover as "strange, funny and adventurous." Try silly, puerile and repetitive.

It is only as the story comes towards the end that we learn what has happened to Isaac and Mary. They have a son whom she takes back to Scotland to meet her parents. Much predictable talk about the eight-hour drive and how Mary will manage - at this stage, Egg has more or less left the story.

On her way back, she has an accident that takes her life while the couple's six-month old son goes into a long period on a hospital ventilator. We learn about him with only a few dozen pages left, by which stage Egg may or may not have changed into a helicopter.

This is a book about grief and how humans can sometimes survive a great loss. It is not clear whether Egg is real or imagined.

There are times when you feel Isaac's pain, other times when you wish he would try to make sense of his life, particularly when flashbacks seem to indicate that he and Mary were a less-than-perfect couple.

Your most likely reaction to finishing the book will be one of relief.