Utterly Monkey, by Nick Laird

We all know the drill for lad-lit novels by now. There will be lots of heavy drinking and heavy swearing; a fight, a party, trouble at work, a quarrel with the best friend. Our hero will embark on a relationship with a beautiful girl, balls it up completely and then get another chance at the end. So much is predictable; but, like any other genre, the lad-lit novel can be done well or badly. Nick Laird generally does it well.

All the above ingredients are there, but Laird has lobbed an extra, unexpected one into the mix: the politics of Northern Ireland. The hero is Danny Williams, a Belfast Protestant who grew up during the Troubles but has left it all behind to work in a London law firm. One day, his schoolfriend Geordie arrives, clutching a bag with £50,000 stolen from the Loyalist militia. Ian, a muscle-bound enforcer from Belfast, is soon hot on Geordie's trail. Throw in Danny's love interest - a beautiful trainee lawyer named Ellen - and their trip to Belfast on a takeover case, and bring to the boil.

But the story never really does come to the boil, as various plot strands peter out. A flashback to the murder of a schoolteacher has curiously little consequence, for example. And between events are long stretches of descriptive writing, enjoyable in themselves but hardly accelerating the narrative drive.

Utterly Monkey's story is told mainly from the alternating viewpoints of Geordie, Danny and Ian, and their perceptions light up every scene. The three main characters convey the bad-bastardness of Belfast life. Geordie is a tough little wire of a man who's had a bullet put through each calf by a Loyalist gang. Ian, aged 16, saw his father murdered. Danny, the respectable solicitor, has the appealing trait of getting mad impulses, and following them through before he can stop himself. The weak link in the characterisation is Ellen. A curious convention of lad-lit is that the women have no flaws. Ellen is beautiful, black, intelligent, nice and, well, that's all.

The novel's strength lies not in the plotting but the quality of the language. Laird's first book was a volume of poetry, To A Fault, and here his poetic gift makes the descriptions jump off the page. He favours the Martian School technique of defamiliarising objects: a tuba is "the ear of a bronze colossus"; chips descending into hot oil make "the hissing and spitting of a cornered cat". What lifts Utterly Monkey above the common run is the sheer energy and inventiveness of the writing.

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