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Just before half way I felt the urge to end my reading: after the strong opening scene the pace stalled and what followed were fairly long, written out descriptions of how an adolescent boy, Lucas Beigne, against his will spends his vacation with his mother in a southern city and amuses himself above all with the chain saw of his deceased grandfather. But the oppressive atmosphere (especially this chainsaw), the confrontations with Arab seasonal workers, the mysterious presence of a dancing American girl next door, and the references to the fraught history of war of the grandfather pushed me to read on, and happily so, because after 100 pages the story really started.

We see how Lucas is seduced by extreme right-wing ideas and participates in actions against asylum-seekers, learns about the secret of the war past of his grandfather, falls in love with the girl next door, and gradually gets deeply into trouble. So there are multiple story lines and in that sense the title "Falling" can be understood in different meanings (in reverse order: to fall for a girl, to be carried away by strong personalities, to be trapped, to lose grip, etc).

But it is clear that Provoost especially intended this book as a warning against the racism and extreme right-wing thinking that was in advance in the early 90s; that message gets a lot of attention, and the portrait of the charismatic leader Benoit is striking; rightly Provoost stresses that the most worrying thing resides in the absolute certainty from which Benoit is reasoning, although I think that also the counterpart Caitlin (the American girl) is a bit to selfcertain at the other end of the spectrum. In the midst between those two strong personalities stands the vacillating Lucas (almost all of his sentences start with "Yes, no"), he's a blank slate that isn’t even aware of his past, turning every way the wind blows and not thinking things through.

For a Dutch-language novel this is more than creditable, though I continued to have problems with the writing style and not all developments were really credible. The dramatic outcome is strong, and happily Provoost zooms in on the developments in the head of Lucas: these go from traumatic upheaval and anger, to understanding and hopeful perspective. This book is at least as much a psychological development novel (coming of age) as a political tendency novel. Although this is not a perfect book, the cocktail of themes and focuses is at least meritorious. (rating 2.5 stars)