House on Fire

Dominic Wilson, a Canadian businessman in Hong Kong in Charles Foran's House on Fire , is on the cusp of turning 40 when he becomes obsessed with a short story set in a repressive country called Gyatso, a fictional version of Tibet. To satisfy his curiosity, recapture his glory days as a journalist, or perhaps play out a strangely literary kind of mid-life crisis, he journeys to that country's capital. Dominic locates the writer--or at least thinks he has--but soon finds himself in a Kafkaesque scenario, detained by the supposed head of the tourist office, befriended by a mysterious Irish-Asian man, and basically in over his head in an increasingly confusing state of affairs. After toying with the notion of being a thriller for the first half, the novel then lurches into the land of literary fiction. First we get to read the short story itself that started Dominic's quest, followed by a stream-of-consciousness mental diary of Dominic's disturbing detainment and a first-person account of his wife Esther's struggle to come to terms with what seems to have happened to her husband. Previously, Foran published three non-fiction books, including Sketches in Winter , a memoir about China, and two novels. In House on Fire , his powers of description remain strong, and his exploration of western attitudes toward the East is engaging. But the story itself bogs down as the author decides to put the reader inside the head of a confused man in an increasingly incomprehensible situation, filtered through a variety of literary techniques. By the novel's elliptical end, the thrill of the thriller, alas, is gone. --Nigel Hunt