Wake Up by Tim Pears

Tim Pears has carved a niche for himself as a chronicler of middle-class English family life. This makes him sound dull as ditchwater, when he's anything but. If most family sagas involve glamorous personalities and charming eccentricities, his are their dark shadow. His speciality is the family that appears normal, an effect he highlights by interesting himself in the business by which they survive. He then lays bare the passions and secrets behind the official history, often making skilful use of the frank tongues and sharp eyes of child witnesses.

Wake Up is a departure for Pears. Unlike In the Place of Fallen Leaves or the televised saga In a Land of Plenty, it is short, and presented from one viewpoint. The narrator, John, drives to work over three weekday mornings and the novel is made up of his thoughts, memories and fears.

He has so much to fear that one day he never reaches the office but circles it on ring-roads as his mind circles the events of his life. He and his brother Greg have built up a potato marketing empire on the back of their father's vegetable stall. Having won an Oxbridge training as a biochemist, John has taken their business beyond chip potatoes to genetically-modified tubers that could vaccinate eaters against cholera. Secret trials using Amazon tribesmen have backfired, and news is about to leak that some volunteers have died.

Apart from the trouble this might cause in the press, it is sure to play havoc on his marriage. His wife Lily, a quondam aristocratic hippy, remains wedded to alternative medicine, organic farming, and the whole raft of conscience-salving, God-free creeds that beset the guiltily rich. The title is her catchphrase when she feels John is blinding himself to the disastrous turn the developed world, led by capitalists like him, is taking. She has no idea of his firm's research, just as she has no idea that he fobs her off with arsenic-rinsed Israeli strawberries in organic packaging at a party she throws.

There are other causes for unease. After years of trying, John and Lily finally have a baby for him to worry about. He is also convinced there is some kind of cancer eating away at him; his doctor suspects he is merely allergic to the threat his baby son poses to his male supremacy.

Wake Up is a deeply unsettling novel, not least because Pears thwarts the reader's desire for the comforts of ordinary narrative, cutting from surgery to marital bed to potato warehouse with the arbitrariness of nightmare. There are glimpses of the Pears familiar to admirers, notably in the quiet fury of John's evocation of his childhood in a trailer surrounded by rotting vegetables, or in the descriptions of parenthood. But there is also an exciting sense of a strong author changing gear, preparing to turn into dark, unsignposted lanes, away from a comfortable future as a sort of male Joanna Trollope.

The reviewer's latest novel is 'Rough Music' (Flamingo)