Enon, by Paul Harding, review Enon sticks to the theme of death and mourning but with the focus now on a father's struggle to cope after the death of his child, in a tale of marital break-up and mental breakdown. In the opening pages, Charlie picks up a voicemail from his wife informing him that their 13-year-old daughter, Kate, has been killed in a road accident. The novel traces 12 months of the aftermath. Charlie finds himself unable to arrange the funeral, and afterwards he punches a wall so hard that his wife has to take him to hospital. She leaves on page 32; he doesn't see her again. Washing down prescription painkillers with whisky gives him a taste for obliteration; soon he's scoring pills on the street and trying to burgle an elderly post-operative neighbour. How that turns out - Charlie ends up tending to the man's dressings before he has to leg it - gives you a flavour of Harding's semi-comic approach to this difficult material. As in Tinkers, much of the novel describes the protagonist's hallucinations: Charlie imagines calling Kate from "a phone somewhere in the woods, a chthonic hotline made of dark horn, resting on a bone cradle." The weirdness helps animate a novel that mostly lacks momentum. Cynics might question the way that Charlie's voice - lucid, imaginative, ironic - stands at odds with the downward spiral he describes. The contrast between voice and theme is an effect of Harding's decision to have Charlie tell his own story in the past tense, a form that processes the rawest of subjects. When Charlie reports walking into a lake to drown himself, the very existence of these statements implies a counter-narrative of consciousness and purpose regained. You'd have to be a ghoul not to be glad when a concluding shift into the present tense ushers that counter-narrative from out of the shadows. What comfort there is turns on something Charlie's wife seems to grasp straight away: that his responsibility as a parent doesn't end with the death of his only child. Enon by Paul Harding William Heinemann, £14.99, 238pp