ALISTAIR BLACK is a 15-year-old schoolboy with a sensitive core and an imaginative mind. Solitary, reclusive, and almost friendless, he spends most of his time closeted in his room, creating the fictitious world of Travulia, for which he makes up characters and records voices.

It comes as no surprise then (except to Alistair himself) that he should be chosen for a part in a hit BBC series, which jolts him out of his secluded fantasy in Leeds into a world of harsh London reality.

This is a coming-of-age novel with a difference: Dyson's interest is in examining how the things that happen to us as young people can affect us for the rest of our lives. Although the events that traumatise Alistair's life, such as a forced trip to the dentist as a child, or a bad experience in a rehearsal, would appear trivial, or at the least surmountable, Dyson paints a realistic picture of a sensitive soul easily scarred.

At one point, Alistair's astrologyobsessed mother predicts his future:

You will pass through life with a carefree disposition and the ability to greet all that comes your way as a challenge or an opportunity." Nothing, needless to say, could be further from the truth.

The novel weaves its way between past and present, between Alistair's teenage encounter with Alice, who acts opposite him on television, to Alistair and Alice's separate adult lives.

Twenty years on from when we first meet her, Alice is a shadow of her former, contained self: nervous, insecure, reaching for the comfort of a drink.

Alistair, meantime, is travelling abroad, has been prescribed with the anti-psychotic drug Haloperidol, and is further distanced from reality than ever.

Dyson is at his best when he is getting underneath people's skin, and as a result this novel is best in its depiction of the fear and loathing that undercut Alistair's life. Although there is at times too great a sense of the underdog made good, such as when Alistair inevitably scoops his BBC part from underneath the noses of his actorly schoolmates, Dyson doesn't push the point. (After all, Alistair's big break hardly sets him on the road to glory. ) Instead, his focus is on the darkness that so often seeps into ordinary lives, and how, in a moment, some sufferers can be saved and others can be lost.

When I think what I might have been, what I might have had, if it wasn't for the fear, " says Alistair at one point . . . and Dyson is surely speaking for more than just his fictitious character here.

There is much reference to religion in the book, mostly in relation to Alice's life.

But it is in the character of Alistair that Dyson really seeks to work through the meaning of life. At the end, too late of course, Alistair appears to figure it out:

The fear was gone. He wanted to laugh at his own foolishness. It had all been nothing. Nothing at all."