Brady Udall: The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

By SUE YOUNGER*

None of this will keep me from believing in God. I believe in Him, I just don't know that I will ever have faith in him."

So says Edgar Mint, believing his fate was sealed at 7 years old when he was run over, his head horribly squashed.

He'd started off pretty badly in the fate stakes. Half-Apache son to an abandoned, drunken mother on an Arizona reservation, Edgar had been damaged by much more than just the wheels of the mailman's Jeep.

But this marvellous book is not a "poor me" tale. On the contrary, Edgar never rails against anything, even when we long for him to fight back.

Dispossession, cruelty, powerlessness - these things are to Edgar as natural and unarguable as dust and cottonwood trees. His innocence and courage, never overstated, creep through our jaded defences as he finds himself in hospital, in a school for delinquents and fostered by a Mormon family.

Through it all, brilliantly, the book is funny. It's a laugh-out-loud romp with wicked observations and an abundance of utterly memorable Dickensian characters. Edgar's is a beautifully written voice which chops and changes deftly from first person, when Edgar remembers taking part in his life, to third person, out-of-body experiences when he looks on in total bewilderment as things happen to someone he knows must have been him. In the wrong hands this could be a clumsy technique but Udall pulls it off, subtly capturing the elusive quality of memory.

The ending is as satisfying as the rest is surprising - it manages to hit us with even keener tragedy at the same time as greater hope. It's not a happy ending, which would have ruined the book. Rather, it's an as-good-as-it-gets ending that, like much of the book, just is. In the end, the only miracle about the life of Edgar Mint is that, despite having broken a few commandments, he survives and with some goodness intact.

Brady Udall will inevitably be compared with Dickens and John Irving. He has the same ability to use an orphaned, damaged innocent to explore the evil and the good in human nature and the nature of fate. And he has the same ability to do it hilariously, introducing us to a score of marvellous, archetypal characters along the way. I especially liked Edgar's Mormon foster parents - good-at-heart, confused, yearning people, achingly familiar in their desire to help damaged children and animals but thwarted by their own needs.

Was Edgar's fate sealed when he was born into disastrously deprived circumstances? Or was it when he was run over? Maybe when the anti-heroic Dr Pinkley, who now believes in Edgar as his creation and his fate, miraculously brought him back to life? What is behind his strong need to find the mailman who ran him over? And how much is determined by Edgar's own psychological make-up?

Read this book this summer and these questions will stay with you deliciously, long after you have finished it.

Jonathan Cape

$34.95

* Sue Younger is an Auckland documentary-maker.