BOOK REVIEW / Charlotte's web in a tangle: Monkey's Uncle - Jenny Diski: Weidenfeld, pounds 14.99

IN MIDDLE AGE, everything has disappointed Charlotte: love, family, ideology. When this novel opens, she is mad and despairing, uprooting shrubs in her front garden and tearing off her clothes with equal ferocity. Carted off to hospital, prescribed anti-depressants and psychotherapy, she splits into two discrete selves whose interdependence is reinstated only when the 'sensible' one returns home and attempts suicide.

The other Charlotte, meanwhile, has been drifting through dream worlds: a cabin on the Beagle where her possible ancestor Robert FitzRoy struggles to maintain his faith in the face of Darwin's discoveries about evolution; a sunny beach where, accompanied by a friendly orang-utan, she meets and disputes with the three great ideologues of the 19th century, Freud, Marx and Darwin himself.

Nothing is certain in this bleak, singular novel, whose theme is 'the essential inconclusiveness which (Charlotte) now believed was all the events of a life could be'. Charlotte may have inherited her suicidal tendencies from Robert FitzRoy, inventor of the weather forecast, who killed himself when the inaccuracy of his predictions in the Times made him a laughing-stock. But her despair could equally be the result of personal tragedy, the recent death of her daughter Miranda in a car crash.

Charlotte is obsessed with the notion of bad blood, staying late at the laboratory where she works to blow up pictures of her own blood cells in a quest to identify fatal genes. She refuses to grieve for Miranda, seeking an alternative explanation for her depression in the spectacular failure of communism (the novel is set just after the pulling down of the Berlin Wall). In her therapy sessions, it emerges that she defended herself against an earlier tragedy with the comforting fiction that her lover's death, also in a car crash, spared him the pain of discovering that she didn't really love him.

What Charlotte reveals to her psychotherapist is a loveless life constructed around the avoidance of pain. With only the vaguest memory of her own father, she has denied her children any knowledge of theirs, distancing herself from people and putting her faith instead in grand, Marx-inspired statements about the human race. Diski thus offers us the traditional choice of explanations - nature or nurture - for Charlotte's character and breakdown, yet suggests that great advances in medical research (Charlotte's work with genes) do little more to further self-knowledge than the ideology which has also failed her.

Charlotte remains, in spite of the best medical care, a mystery to herself. In the novel's mad scenes, her mentor is a dainty, parodically feminine orang-utan called Jenny (like the book's author) whose speeches vacillate between common sense and a kind of irritating nonsense reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. This creature simultaneously mimics and mocks the notion of a coherent narrative voice, attempting to force Charlotte and the reader into a reluctant recognition of the novel's terrifying thesis of isolation as the defining human condition.

There are, unsurprisingly for so ambitious an enterprise, scenes in Monkey's Uncle that don't quite work - conversations which veer into the didactic or whose symbolism is heavy-handed. The transitions between real life and fantasy are often mannered and abrupt, although this can perhaps be forgiven as an attempt to reproduce the disjunctive effect of madness. But Diski has produced a genuine novel of ideas which manages, for the most part, to integrate character and theory in a way which other contemporary novelists (Fay Weldon springs to mind) have attempted and failed. Monkey's Uncle stands alone for its bleakness, for its direct and unadorned prose and for its daring assault on the boundaries of fiction. It is a stunning, if flawed, achievement.

(Photograph omitted)