During his childhood Mike was lost twice. Once to an abductress and once to a bullying teenage gang. In each case his parents rescued their offspring and strengthened their links with him. Then came the wrench of a parting that was less traumatic but more final, Mike left home to become a student. Though the phone calls came once a week assuring them that all was well at university, Mike's intuitive mother knew that it was not. At last they go to see him, but he has vanished.

And so the search begins, a search that takes Mike's father to Germany where he discovers something about himself but fails to find his son. It is a search that leads him back to his wife only to allow them to witness the last act of the young man that they love as he destroys himself for a cause which they had no idea that he espoused. A violent suicide is a tragedy underlined when the subject is young and has the crisp white pages of an unwritten life before him. The fact that this death is carefully orchestrated, publicly committed and brings about the death of at least one other exaggerates the tragedy and increases the pain it brings with it.

Is it really possible for a normal young man to undergo a fundamental character change in just a few months? Maybe it all depends on what is normal? Mike's formative years were spent in an outwardly stable, entirely sheltered, but mostly friendless environment. In the background was an angelic sister who died in the womb, a father with a serious sexual dysfunction, a mother with a guilty secret and a perfect grandmother who died before Mike's eyes when he was very young. And yet this boy grows up in a cocoon of parental love, protected in his isolation by a mother and father who place him at the centre of their lives.

Then Mike suffers the crushing disappointment of rejection on first entering university. Most students experience intense homesickness in their first weeks at uni. Mike experiences homesickness, gang violence, illness, rejection and loneliness without relief. Unwilling to confide in his parents, the only people that might help, he clutches at just one straw of support - a mysterious character who haunts the edges of the university campus. Here he finds an odd, but rewarding, friendship - a relationship that transcends his immediate problems and feeds his adolescent mind with revolutionary thoughts that align perfectly with his receptive mental state.

Mike finds the anti-globalisation creed pedalled by this character very easy to swallow. He also finds solace in smoking the cannabis that his friend grudgingly supplies him and in the golden light that is created within his dreams and leads him to the angelic presence of his long dead sister. He abandons the student life that has so disappointed him and, on the instructions of his friend, travels to an international squat in Germany.

This is his epiphany, for a few days Mike is in paradise. He is with friends in a creative, idealistic community, the environment he had craved when he first entered university. But then, perhaps inevitably, he is cast into hell. A hell which hardens him for the task ahead - to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to speed the destruction of global capitalism. He travels to Rome and there becomes a martyr to his cause and creates a shocking denouement for his parents.