Fiction: No greater love hath a man for a woman than the guy who set out to prove his undying devotion by eating a 747 aircraft down to its last bolt. The approach may be unusual but then romance is a funny thing and nothing sharpens the affections quite like falling for someone who may like you - but not that way.
Ben Sherwood's first novel The Man Who Ate The 747 had more going for it than just a catchy title. It was a romance featuring a likeable small-town hero and in an age of sharp, slick fiction based in sharp, slick living, it was that rare thing - charming. It was always funny and original.
This time round, with novel two, Sherwood is not that lucky, corny rather than funny and so unconvincing that the reader may find him or herself choking on the syrup. If the title doesn't serve as a warning the "I believe in miracles" opening line will. His lightness of touch and ability to evoke the intimacy of a small-town community has faltered into sickly sweetness.
More gooey than moving, The Death and Life of Charlie St Cloud irritates through an assumed wholesomeness that is merely a way of spinning out a ridiculous yarn based on repeated references to the heroine's beauty and the hero's endless capacity for avoiding life by hiding in death.
It is the gushingly written, smugly homespun story of two young brothers who are buddies. They play together and ultimately die together when the neighbour's car they "borrowed" in order to drive to a baseball game, crashes into a truck. A fireman who believes no victim is dead until they are really very dead, is determined to revive the boys and their pet beagle.
There is no hope for the younger boy and the dog, but Charlie is dragged back from death. The only catch is instead of living he becomes caught in a kind of half-life in which by working in the local cemetery, he is able each evening to play baseball with Sam, his dead brother.
Meanwhile Sam, who may remind other readers of Casper the Friendly Ghost, larks about, accompanied by Oscar the Beagle who is also busy having fun in the afterlife. Although Charlie is now a 28-year-old man instead of the 15- year-old boy he was at the time of the accident, Sam remains 12. It is all a bit like James Wilcox, a master of mild small-town comedy, on a very bad day.
Everyone knows each other In Sherwood's New England town, but no one seems to be either really alive, or really dead. Tess, the heroine, is a skilled yachtswoman who also has her own sail-making company. She is devastatingly beautiful in a tossed hair and baseball-cap-wearing sort of way. She loves danger, her loyal dog and her Dad who died and left her. All Grace, her mother, can do is love her and let her do her own thing. In Tess's case, doing her own thing amounts to sailing solo around the world.
Even the best of sailors can't beat the sea, and Tess seems to be having trouble. Or did she? Anyhow, she ends up meeting Charlie and they fall in love so quickly that Charlie seems to forget that he has devoted his life to playing baseball at dusk with his dead kid brother.
Not even a convincing fantasist such as Alice Hoffman, not even the great Anne Tyler, could help this self-regarding little tale populated by the living dead and the dead living. Everything you ever need to know, and a lot more besides, about brotherly love is served up here in giant helpings. As for the romance, well, it is cringe-making. Is Tess alive or dead? Who knows? Who cares? The chances are, however, she is somewhere in between.
Just when things are looking really bad for her, the reader having already given up, Charlie executes a dramatic rescue that would embarrass even the most wayward of Hollywood script writers. In life there is hope and death is not a disaster either, or so Ben Sherwood appears to be saying in this simplistic sermonising brotherly love performance.
His life-in-death and death-in-life thesis is rocky at best. It certainly confirms that one good idea, or indeed, one good novel, does not necessarily add up to a second good idea or a credible second book. This is a narrative that may embarrass, may possibly offend, but is unlikely to entertain anyone who manages to reach the final page only to wonder why they bothered reading such contrived drivel.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
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