The Night Climbers, By Ivo Stourton

Ah, the Oxbridge college. The plink of croquet balls, the twist of black ties, the splash of the Cam over your punt pole. Some might wish that world had passed into distant memory. One look at that Bullingdon Club photo of Cameron, Johnson et al, reminds you that they're still alive and inbreeding.

Ivo Stourton's debut is for readers of a tweedy sensibility. Loved The Line of Beauty, mooned over Brideshead, lapped up The Secret History? Then this one's for you. James, a thirtysomething, Hoxton-dwelling city lawyer with a shelf-full of porn and a little black book filled with escort agency numbers, receives an unexpected visit from Jessica, an old university chum. Over the course of one night's reminiscences, we hear the story of his undergraduate years and how, as a fresher at Tudor College, he was enchanted by his social superiors. One climbs in through the window of his rooms, evading the porters on a midnight scramble over the college rooftops. In no time at all, James has inveigled himself into the milieu of weekend hunt balls, secret dining societies and coke-fuelled daredevil stunts.

King of this nocturnal highlife is the doomed but dreamy Francis Manley, product of Lord Soulford's shortlived liaison with a Zimbabwean model. Sometime lover of Jessica and focus of James's homoerotic fascination, Francis is a fighter, a gambler and a fraud. This fatal combination gives rise to a plan of gobsmacking effrontery - the group needs cash to fund its ongoing excesses and how better to provide it than a multi-million pound forgery? After all, as Francis says, the only limiting factor in life is imagination.

Let's face it, if your taste favours Welsh, Irvine, over Waugh, Evelyn, we've already lost you. But you'd be missing something because Stourton really can write. Okay, he sometimes writes a little bit too much - there's an occasional pile-up of metaphors, a crush of adjectives - but which first-time novelist avoids that trap? He's a little too much in love with the snobberies of the social set he's chosen to depict. But if there's a market for it, why not? He hasn't yet learnt to wear his learning lightly - the lecture on the role of dancing in the choruses of Greek tragedy is elegantly written but rather inexpertly shoe-horned into a chapter end; ditto the digression on the bad quarto version of Hamlet - but did that do Donna Tartt any harm?

Stourton shows that he can do low-life, too - just. Most importantly, and unlike many of his peers, he can keep a plot under firm control. There are enough twists, but not so many as to be wholly implausible, and no blind forays into subplots or setpieces. He's unlikely to leave Hollinghurst territory for Irvine Welsh-world any time soon, but his next move will certainly be worth watching.