The noise is generated by a loud, ritual dissection of a shark-sized tuna, amplified by a cacophony of conflicting advice and a chorus of gulls after a slice of the action.The smallest measurable distance in the world between market and meal can be yours when you step inside the Trattoria Tripoli. "There is no Mafia in Sicily - that's just a story from the government." Because he looked barely 19, was driving a pristine white Mercedes convertible and wore deathly black sunglasses, I just smiled. The relationship between Kraven and his lover, Stella, is especially stinging and rich - at once exhilarating and confusing, and a grand tribute to the insistent tug of desire. One hates to add another name to the roll- call of famous writers with whom Isler has been compared, but he does seem to be inspired by Philip Roth here: the sense of love as a heady, fleeting refuge from the grave. The novel begins in a cemetery, among the worms, and the vivid actions in the book - eating and sex - are just glorious flights from the inescapable concern with age Kraven ends the book as he began it, sobbing His mum could have told him it would all end in tears..

Within minutes of my starting to hitch-hike around Sicily, a friendly local had put me right about a thing or two. Eventually his path takes him back to the house in Harrogate where he was born, back to the family disaster which gave birth to his unusual demons. The climax at the end - a dramatic childhood incident - is fierce and touching, but it is a touch pat to suppose that it works as an explanation for the character Kraven has become.Isler moves his characters through their scenes with a lovely deep wit: everything is fresh and avid, and we can't perhaps ask for more than that. He got away with it then, but the past is catching up with him. He finds himself hounded by sexual harrassment charges - a slightly wearying plot concession to a fashionable American concern - and sets off for Europe in search (rather implausibly) of his mistress's husband.As if by magic, he gets chummy with an extraordinary range of characters: an old woman with a magnificent aphrodisiac potion, a clutch of strippers eager to put on a bawdy Shakespearean cabaret, an indignant old Jewish Marxist who turns out to be the father of one of the strippers.