Every writer writes for a reader. Every writer sends a voice out, hoping to reach the person who can answer. The relationship may be acknowledged or not, it doesn't matter-it exists. Hallucinating Foucault, Patricia Duncker's first novel, is an exploration into the intangible intimacy that binds together the writers of words and the person who reads them.

The novel's narrator, a nameless young student at Cambridge University, is writing his dissertation on Paul Michel, a beautiful French novelist who shocked the world with his openly gay exploits and his brutally brilliantwork. Then, quite without warning, Paul Michel went mad and never wrote again.

The narrator has no idea what happened to his writer, and has made no attempt to find out. After all, "I'm not writing about his life," he says. "I'm studying his fiction." But when he becomes romantically involved with another student-a linguist whom he calls, simply, The Germanist-he learns that Paul Michel has been locked away in a French mental institution for the past nine years.

The Germanist issues the narrator a challenge. "If you love someone, you know where they are, what has happened to them. And you put yourself at risk to save them if you can," she says. And: "If you're not in love with the subject of your thesis it'll all be very dry stuff, you know." (She herself writes love letters to Schiller.)

So the narrator sets off to France to find his writer, and to save him, if he can. What drove Paul Michel mad?, he wants to know. Why has he stopped writing? And most of all: What is the link between his work and that of the philosopher Michel Foucault?

The narrator's search leads him to the Archive in Paris, where he finds Paul Michel's letters to Foucault, which have been sitting unread since the novelist was institutionalized. Like The Germanist's letters to Schiller, they are love letters. Also like the Germanist's letters to Schiller, they were never sent.

In them, Paul Michel writes, "You ask me what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, I will lose you." The narrator decides that no one should write like that and remain unanswered. When he does finally find his madman he presents himself-to Paul Michel's great chagrin-as "Your English reader".

Neither man is prepared for the relationship that follows, and I certainly don't want to spoil your pleasure in discovering it for yourself. Duncker draws out the tensions between the youth and the middle-aged, the mad and the sane, the writer and his reader with clear, unornamented prose. And while the story is dark and sometimes disturbing, it is throughout touched with humour, compassion, and a curious kind of hope.

Duncker skillfully layers the relationships between writers and their readers. Her use of fictionalized articles and letters makes us part of the narrator's process of research and discovery, and when we finally do meet the truly mad, entirely unpredictable and fascinatingly hilarious Paul Michel, we have invested as much into the relationship as he has.

Quite simply, Hallucinating Foucault has become one of my few favourite books.

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