A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

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As we focus more and more on Fran, he emerges as a highly complex and frightening figure: good-looking, persuasive and larger than life. A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better is a deeply psychological story with creative twists that shock and captivate.

I found myself checking the % marker on the Kindle with every page in the hope that I was nearing the end. Daniel is heading in the right direction away from his past, but he knows that his father could be within him. Daniel’s trip with his father is punctuated by the audio book (on casette tape) of The Artifex, a story about a young boy who when he becomes seperated from his siblings in a forest is found by a woman who says she is from a different planet. Wood takes the passing, shabby details of mundane landscapes and makes them jitter and throb with yearning and menace.

The book starts off like any family drama, a steady rise in tension showing the aftermath of a family break-up. A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better is his best work yet – a novel written from the gut, and with a correspondingly visceral power. If you don’t think you’ll read it but you want my opinions on it anyway, for some reason, or if you don’t mind knowing some details of the promised violence before opening the book, read on. because the writing was good, the lack of the other 3 because it was like trying to walk through treacle, a sad slightly pointless plot, unlikeable characters. Daniel Jarrett (previously Hardesty) narrates the story in reflection, starting in 1995 as he is due to leave on a road trip with his estranged father, Francis (Fran) Hardesty.

There is a short passage, two thirds of the way through Benjamin Wood’s elegant and disturbing novel, in which Fran Hardesty, a man described as being perennially of “two weathers”, finally becomes his true self. This is not a light or an easy read and it's far more than a mere thriller though the tension mounts inexorably through the first part of the book. I didn’t have a lot of empathy for the characters, but the expectation of an inevitable shock waiting to pounce had me transfixed.Tenderly dissecting the limits of love between parent and child while wriggling with a rich, thrilling tension, this palpably atmospheric story found its way beneath my skin and now lives there. A heartbreaking and heart-stopping new novel; a dark Northern noir that moves at breakneck speed but never fails to be tender and vulnerable as well as visceral and terrifying. His third book, A STATION ON THE PATH TO SOMEWHERE BETTER (2018), was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the European Union Prize for Literature. The first two thirds of this are a powerful depiction of the devastation caused when someone ‘flips their lid’. Which might well be a recipe for something his mother might have approved of, but it has no basis in Greek drama.

He is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel The Bellwether Revivals. The build up in the first half of the book had me slightly on edge reading,just waiting for the bad thing to happen. Wood’s third novel is a gripping work, his chilling creation Francis Hardesty leaving an indelible mark.This is a psychological character study, a story of a boy—now a man—who went on a journey with his father, estranged from the family, with the hope that he will prove his constancy, and instead, finds himself in a situation that few sane people could hope to endure.

His debut The Bellwether Revivals (2012) was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and won France's Prix du Roman Fnac. Sometimes the bubbling undercurrent of impending violence felt like rambling, but at a point, you realise you’re totally enraptured in the development of the plot. As his story unfolds, you don't really find the suspense that is promised on the cover, but more of a sadness for him. I still might have given it four stars but for the final section which I thought self indulgent and poorly connected to the earlier story.

Also, throughout the book we "listen" along with Daniel to an audiobook of the book that the Artifex series is based on. Daniel Jarrett/Hardesty narrates the story as a memoir, starting in 1995 when he is due to leave on a road trip with his father, Francis (Fran) Hardesty. A 12-year-old English boy’s road trip with his father afflicts the rest of his life in Wood’s uneven latest (after The Ecliptic). His mother prepares him for disappointment, telling him that “ your father does whatever suits him….