Sport certificate template

THE TUESDAY BOOK: A tale of obsession, porn and cricket

THERE ARE not many novels that deal seriously with the consumption, as opposed to the production, of pornography. That Malcolm Knox's fine second novel does, and also treats the world of international cricket, sets it up in a sub-genre of its own: the porn- and-cricket novel.

The cricket comes courtesy of Chris Brand, batting for Australia - and to save his career - days after the death of his father John, respected doctor and family man. The widow Brand watches the test on television, struggling to hide the shock she feels at her "state of profound normality". Another son, Davis, a doctor like his father, sniffs around inconsistencies in the death certificate. A third son, Hammett, hovers out of view, ready to make his dramatic re-entrance after years of estrangement.

It's a template reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. The absent father (whether through death or Parkinson's disease) is the void that sucks scattered children back to the fusty, suburban territory of the family home. Knox's book may be similar to Franzen's epic in style, but its scope is narrower. His subjects can be counted on one hand: grief, sibling rivalry, cricket.

And pornography. For John Brand, doctor and family man, is also an old porn-hound, come late to the chase and knocked sideways by where it led him. As Davis observes, "Obscenity laws are meant to protect the vulnerable. Everybody assumes that means children, but men like Pa - these men were utterly unready for what they would find on the Internet." A lust for hardcore websites, then magazines and videos, and finally an obsession with one star, has undone him: made him "in the heart of his family, a stranger".

It is the novel's one blatant contrivance that Hammett, the black sheep, is now in the porn business, and that he alone stumbles on his father's secret. In the sections set before his death - which he, like any good doctor, sees coming - we see John Brand accept the rapprochement of his youngest son, climaxing in a night out at an international porn conference. Two days later, Chris Brand is walking out to bat with a black band on his arm.

Some of the most enjoyable passages (and its least enjoyable one) concern cricket - peeked here from the inside, thanks to Knox's writing on the sport for the Sydney Morning Herald. What batsmen say in those chit-chats between overs, what goes through their heads as the ball swings towards them: these insights would be intriguing enough on their own, and are even more so as Knox folds them expertly into the story.

The title may sound like a come-on, but there is as much in it to make grown men shudder as grin and lick their chops. For Knox, that shudder, and what it tells us about ourselves, is what being adult is all about.