Anger mismanagement

There is anger that bubbles naturally when either something makes a U-turn and starts driving in the opposite direction to where we want it to or when someone cuts us up on the road. Then we take a deep breath and leave them to their boy-racer, boom box idiocy while we fume, dream up revenge situations and ask ourselves out loud how stupid some people can be.

Anger boils over, sizzles and spits when we can't let an incident go. We launch threats at them from the driver's window, swerve in Lewis Hamilton-style, then arrive home and spend the next two hours ranting and raving about "that dangerous idiot" to any family member who has enough patience to hear us out. A week later when we see the same guy on the road, we try and swerve into him. And so it goes on.

Yet a variety of anger, borne of some childhood incident a psychiatrist would have a field day with, just never lets go, attaching itself like a cancer, multiplying and spreading until it seems as if every fibre in the body rattles with its vibrations. It starts to inform everything we do, invading our senses so that all we see and hear we do through its filter.

It is this kind of extreme feeling which seems to have completely taken over the two main characters in Trezza Azzopardi's Winterton Blue. Anna, love life nil, misgivings 10, detests her mother. As only family members can grate and irk, Rita, the mum, irritates her daughter to death, with her fag-hag ways with Vernon, her faux joie-de-vivre and the I'm-70-but-independent-and-funky attitude. Yet despite Anna's hatred towards Rita, she still goes on holiday with her to Crete: put two disparate characters who cannot even agree on what "relaxing" means away from their base, and the results are either disastrous or less disastrous.

Then there's Lewis, still shocked at the death of his twin brother Wayne more than 20 years after it happened. His anger takes on a physiological structure as he lapses into mental white-outs which struggle valiantly to keep his past from creeping back in. He goes back to Cardiff to supposedly meet up with his mother, who he has not seen since he was a child but inevitably ends up meeting the agents of his brother's demise, Manny, then Carl, who he plans to kill. The two separate life stories come together when Lewis and Anna cross paths. Then there is yet another kind of anger which is rarely, if ever, expressed. The anger that a book reviewer feels when a story just will not kick off 50 pages into a book; the frustration at not being able to understand what is going on because the narrative is so tenuous, the wording so simple yet intentionally complicated, and leading nowhere fast. A regular reader can just fling the book back on a shelf, or hand it over to a friend they don't really like. A reviewer has to go on wading into the cold waters of the story which never seems to end or go anywhere.

Lewis seems to be a character from the 1930s. We know that eventually he will meet Anna - there must be a point to all this A Boy Called It kind of fiction - but we have no idea what will bring them together because they seem to be from different eras. Anna is frustrated, unhappy and tooth-grindingly irritating, but we never find out why. The only character who wins us over and who we end up sympathising with is Rita: if her grating daughter thinks she's so bad, then there must be something good about her. In comparison to the main characters, Rita is, in fact, a joy. You almost want to take her out of the book and let her live her sorted-out life. Winterton Blue does have patches of light in its descriptive passages, especially of the coast, which just sway the readers and transport them. Otherwise, it just drags and wheezes to its unfulfilling end. Both characters wish they could "start again". We wish they had never even started.

• Mr Borg trusts books more than he trusts life.

• A review copy of this title was supplied by www.ilovebooks.com.mt