Some are worth hanging on to, if you know what I mean," says Dr Weir at one point. Lighting the candles for his mother's tarot readings, he says: "I probably added to the atmosphere, like some strange, mute goblin that would emerge now and then from the gloom to tend to the various flickering fires." But there are moments when you wonder if the novel is too winsome for its own good. Childless Mr Peterson fills the gap marked "father" in Alex's life rather too neatly, while neurologist Dr Enderby and physicist Dr Weir are like two good fairies dispensing pearls of advice on demand. The novel has many funny lines, with most of the comedy spun out of the contrast between Alex's precocity and his innocence. They start a reading group, for which Alex's notice in the local library reads: "Ever wondered why we're here? Where we're going? What the point is? Concerned about the state of the universe in general? THE SECULAR CHURCH OF KURT VONNEGUT: a book club." But these philosophical soirees (with flapjacks by Mrs Griffith) turn out to be only a brief respite from real‑life dealings with mortality, for it soon transpires that The Universe versus Alex Woods is a book about assisted dying. The shed belongs to Mr Peterson, an American widower who smokes pot, loves Kurt Vonnegut and fought in Vietnam, and Alex's friendship with Peterson fills the remaining three-quarters of the book.
Rejoining the local secondary, he is bullied, but unharmed, by thugs who one day chase him into a neighbour's garden shed. I'd have a different brain – different connections, different function." Alex is transfigured by his close encounter with outer space.įorced to stay off school until his fits can be controlled by a mixture of meditation and medication, he reads Tolkien, conducts a charming correspondence with a meteor expert and helps in his mother's shop. Five years later, when he decides the time has come to take the iron-nickel fragment off his bookshelf and give it to the Natural History Museum, he reflects that "without the meteorite, I would have been an entirely different person. What Alex's personality was like before the meteor hit we don't know.
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