The Great Perhaps

The Caspars are falling apart as George W. Bush rushes towards reelection and the country towards paranoid door-closing. Joe Meno's book not only encapsulates a time in history, of paranoia and suspicion, of lack of faith in politics and maximised patriotism, but he also writes about the failings of a dysfunctional family with humour and tenderness and ballot boxes of pathos.

Jonathan is the obsessive, believing in the WMDs wholeheartedly (this time represented by his search for a mythical squid) until the belief and the reality cross wires in a way he never appreciates, leading to a failing marriage and faith in him. His wife Maddy is the liberal, unsure and conflicted, chasing invisible clouds; his daughter Amelia is the revolutionary idealist with no substance to her learned beliefs, and Thisbe is the religious zealot, given to depraved thoughts she struggles to control.

Despite their political archetypes and representations, the Caspar family are a well-drawn series of family members. Jonathan and Maddy's marriage fails on his work-obsessions and her studies in human behaviours propelling them both to inevitabilities they don't understand. Amelia and Thisbe are polar opposite teenagers, given to thinking with their polemic rather than their hearts. They all love too much and they all believe too much. The clouds of doom hang around them as they struggle to function fully as a family unit. Then the mythical squid is discovered. By the French. And it all falls apart.

With a Beatles soundtrack whistling wistfully in its ear, The Great Perhaps is a sharp and spiritual political story about a family falling apart, brimming with laughs-aplenty and bathetic characters trying their hardest to act their age.