Chay: Dangerous Obsessions by Alan Titchall
Alan Titchall’s Chay: Dangerous Obsessions is a brisk and readable sequel that returns to the world of Guardians while shifting attention to the next generation. Set in 2026, the novel follows Chayton Duncan, the son Robert Smith left behind on Vancouver Island, as he travels to New Zealand in search of answers about his father’s death. Bob, also known as Ropata and Smithie, was found dead in 1998 in a forest near the central North Island village where he was raised. Eighteen years later, Chay arrives among Bob’s eccentric old friends, hoping to understand not only the circumstances of that death, but the complicated network of human and spiritual guardians connected to his father’s life.
The premise has strong emotional appeal. Chay’s investigation is a son’s attempt to reclaim a missing inheritance. He has grown up with absence, rumour and fragments, and his return to New Zealand becomes a journey into a past others have learned to live with, conceal or mythologise. Titchall uses this structure to explore memory, loyalty and the dangerous comfort of obsession. Chay believes he is pursuing truth, but the novel is alert to the fact that truth can become another kind of trap when it is tied to grief.
As a sequel, the book clearly draws energy from returning characters and unresolved secrets. Readers of Guardians will likely gain more from the reappearance of Bob’s surviving circle and the final reckoning with earlier events. Yet the novel also works to establish Chay’s own story, particularly through the tension between Canadian and New Zealand settings, and through his encounter with people who knew versions of his father he never did. The presence of kaitiaki, revenge, justice and spiritual connection gives the narrative a distinctly local charge, setting it apart from more conventional family mystery plots.
Titchall writes in the manner of a storyteller who enjoys momentum. The plot moves through danger, romance, old grudges and revelations at a steady clip, and the book’s relatively compact length helps maintain pace. At times, the prose and characterisation may favour directness over subtlety, and some of the larger emotional turns might have benefited from more space to settle. The subtitle’s promise of obsession is persuasive, though the novel is sometimes more interested in keeping the yarn moving than in lingering inside Chay’s psychology.
Even so, Chay: Dangerous Obsessions has an engaging sincerity. Its interest in fathers and sons, spiritual inheritance and the uneasy relationship between justice and revenge gives it weight beneath the surface action. Titchall brings his earlier story towards closure while allowing Chay to stand as more than a vessel for old secrets. This is a lively New Zealand novel about the costs of opening doors others have tried to keep shut, and about the difficult question of whether knowing the past can ever free us from it.
Reviewer: Chris Reed
Devon Media
