Another novel to prove, if proof was needed, how utterly heartless and without pity I am becoming. Sorry, Nathan Filer, I come to rain all over your parade. Well, quite a lot of it. 
 The blurb has these three little sentences: 
 There are books you can't stop reading, which keep you up all night 
 (Well, I actually was reading this most of last night, but that's because I had insomnia.) 
 There are books which let us into the hidden parts of life and make them vividly real. 
 (Referring to the world of the schizophrenic, since that's what this novel is all about. But I wouldn't call mentally ill young people and their lives in and out of institutions a hidden part of life , there are movies (Broken, Silver Linings Playbook, etc etc) and books ( Henry's Demons - recommended - and lots of others), it's not terra incognita. 
 There are books which, because of the sheer skill with which every word is chosen, linger in your mind for days. 
 (Wow, fire that blurb writer! For days you say?! Sheer skill? I suppose with not so much skill a book will only linger for minutes. So yeah, they still crank out this silly OTT hypegloop.) 
 THE BIG BLACK PLOT DEVICE 
 This book won the Costa first novel award, so what do I know. I was almost completely unthrilled. It was tiresome. I mean to say, there's this big thing which is hinted at in the first few pages and which hangs over the rest of novel like a Big Black Cloud About to Burst Forth With Torrential Rain. The schizophrenic brother whose impressionistic memoir/confession we are reading has in some way caused the death of his Down Syndrome brother (yes, this is a blighted family). Cornily, the Big Reveal of What Really Happened That Fateful Day is coughed up only on page 247. The fake suspense of waiting to find out what you figure out roughly from page 5 does not kill you. It just makes you think oh are they still using this plot device? They should really stop. 
 I thought I would only write a three line bah-humbug review, but the sheer skill with which every single word was chosen has made the crabbiness I felt linger in my mind for... hours. 
 I'D LIKE TO TEACH THE WORLD TO SING IN PERFECT HARMONY (BUT I DON'T THINK I'LL GET ROUND TO IT) 
 It says here - 
 The comedian Jo Brand has called The Shock of the Fall "one of the best books about mental illness" and judges for the Costa book awards said it was a novel "so good it will make you feel a better person". 
 Maybe it is, maybe it will. But I thought the bleak realism and painful memories of Matt's story did not then mean it was okay to ladle dollops of sentimental goop into the mix. It's strange how wildly different reactions to novels can be - look at the love-gush that puthered all over Donna Tartt's latest whopper, and look at this rather good review here. 
 SOMETHING I DID LIKE 
 You do get a very strong sense of the mental bind that some patients (or : "service users"!) get into once they're sucked into the mental health biz. The regime is almost designed to engender fear and distrust. They're confined to a facility. And drugs are administered to them, all of which have horrible side effects (even the drugs they give you to combat the side effects of the first drugs). And there's no choice in any of this. They have proved they're incapable of existing in the outside world in one way or another, so there they are, here's their diagnosis, there's the drugs (if you don't take those 6 pills we'll inject you) and there's your room. So, the patients become locked into a low-level interior guerrilla war against the people who are trying to help them. Inside their heads - as well as fighting their illness - every mental patient is either consciously or unconsciously Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The staff are their enemies (even the nice ones). (Matt : I don't hate these people. I just hate not having the choice to get rid of them.) The terminology is dehumanising. Their lives are deserts of idle hours spent smoking with a guy who talks to his tattoos. Or daytime tv, your choice. 
 Last time I went into the office to borrow the Nursing Dictionary, I counted three mugs, a mouse mat, a bunch of pens, two Post-It note booklets and the wall clock - all sporting the brands of different medicines. It's like being in prison and having to look at adverts for fucking locks. 
 SOMETHING ELSE I LIKED 
 Matt is haunted by his dead brother 
 If the tap choked and spluttered before the water came, he was saying I'm lonely. When I opened a bottle of Dr Pepper and the caramel bubbles fizzed over the rim, he was asking me to come out and play. He could speak through an itch, the certainty of a sneeze, the after-taste of tablets, or the way sugar fell from a spoon. 
 No doubt at all, this book has its heart in the right place, unlike mine, which was abandoned a long time ago in a left luggage locker in a train station in a town whose name I no longer recall.