by I Allan Sealy Picador $225 The leading man in I Allan Sealy's latest novel, Lev, is a Russian biologist who has a dark past, to put it mildly. His Cold War job was to cultivate 'the living face of death' - a Sars-like germ warfare bug called Kurile-D. Watching Kurile-D multiply in the laboratory was a petrifying experience, he says. 'It all but sprang out of the dish, its hordes pouring in every direction from a black hole that welled up continuously out of nowhere.' Lev's role was to harness that power and so stop both fear and the virus breaking out. One of his colleagues, Meschersky, however, became contaminated, with grisly consequences - hundreds of capillaries burst in his eyes. Sealy, a participant in this year's Hong Kong International Literary Festival and whose previous novel, The Everest Hotel, made the 1998 Booker Prize shortlist, drives home the horror in chillingly clinical language. As his medical thriller develops, the tense changes and, in that new Russia 'where physicists wash windows and engineers drive trams', Sealy's protagonist finds himself reduced to working as a chauffeur. Lev then heads to India to seek his fortune, but has hardly left the airport when a gang robs him at gunpoint. When he wakes the next morning, his stomach turns over. He looks finished. However, redemption swans up soon enough in the shape of a puppet-maker named Maya who takes Lev in and causes him to succumb to the 'brainfever' of love. Returning the favour, Lev gives her a virus that locals later assume to have been the cause of a plague that breaks out. Lev becomes a hunted man and has to face some pretty unpleasant hostility, including a castration attempt and an acid attack. Move over the king of the gut-churning medical thriller, Ben Mezrich. The lively plot Sealy spins out is enhanced by some spellbinding descriptive passages. In one episode redolent of Sylvia Plath's medical suicide novel, The Bell Jar, Sealy delineates a chalk-white nurse with dyed black hair whose flesh 'droops like smooth pastry over the point of her elbow; the nearer ear lobe is a downy meadow'. Rarely will the reader encounter a book whose characters come to life with such physical urgency. Another strong point of The Brainfever Bird is the deliciously wicked, South Park-style humour exemplified by a vignette of stressed-out laboratory monkeys in Lev's early days. While one stares 'drop-jawed', glumly grinding its teeth, another masturbates listlessly. Although The Brainfever Bird is an original book it is not a great one because, when it comes to dialogue, Sealy makes the mistake of including the boring bits. For instance, when Maya meets Lev, the exchange begins with each of them divulging their name then she asks if he is a tourist. 'A visitor,' he says. 'From?' she asks. 'Russia,' he answers. 'Russia?' she echoes. 'Yes.' The reader who has contrived to stay awake is then treated to Maya's embarrassing Dr Zhivago-style rejoinder: 'I have a friend who speaks Russian. Or at least reads it. He knows your poets off by heart.' It gets worse. The epilogue: a love letter from Lev to Maya and her reply feels like an incredibly laboured attempt to tie up loose ends. It is almost as if Sealy completed the book and then had a panic attack (or a call from his editor) about the plot's cohesion. The author makes Lev spell out that he is making a good recovery from the acid attack ('I have had surgery again on the area and it was a 70 to 80 per cent success'). The reader then learns that the surgeon was a friend and did not charge (as if it needed saying). Maya responds with some routine schmaltz about whether Lev was an angelic visitation and, come the final page (358), the reader may experience an irritating sense of anticlimax. For all its promise, The Brainfever Bird fizzles out ignominiously, with a squawk of failure rather than triumph.