Books: Dial M for misadventure

Who's that on the end of the call-centre phone? Lawrence Norfolk gets a direct line to dysfunction: Eight Minutes Idle by Matt Thorne Sceptre, pounds 10, 474pp

MATT THORNE has the knack of making us like the unlikeable: lecherous old men and Weston-super-Mare in his first novel, Tourist. Now, in his second, it is the turn of the people who put us on hold when we dial into a call centre, one being the main stage for the shenanigans of Eight Minutes Idle. The narrator and hero is Dan, a twentysomething slacker with an overhang of debt and a job answering telephones to pay for it. "Some days having a job seems the most decadent pursuit imaginable," he kicks off, winningly. He lives with his divorced father in a shared bedsit until a mysterious hit-and-run incident lands Dad in hospital and doubles Dan's rent. The solution is to move into the office.

Unconventionally enough, his problems do not start there. He begins an affair with his unpopular, uptight boss, Alice, and his team mates promptly ostracise him. His father seems to be having affairs with seven different women and Dan is deputed to sort this out.

They turn out to be a self-support therapy group (phew) who thus know all about Dan's father's homicidal impulses towards his son (aargh!), but also that they are merely symbolic (phew). The plot undulates as it unfolds at its own measured pace, while Dan goes to work, drinks beer, eats burgers, sneaks on one of his work mates (for making unauthorised personal calls) then lies about it, borrows money from another...

Dan is a shit. It comes as a shock to realise this, and the realisation comes late in a long book. A nice shit - congenial company - but still a shit.

Excavating the depths of haplessness within the average hapless slob is a tried and tested Amisian tactic. Thorne reverses it, filling Dan's holes with happiness. We like him because he likes himself, although neither we nor he probably ought to. We even like him when Dan's cat - domiciled in the call centre's roof-space - chokes to death on Dan's dutifully- knotted condom, deposited there after a quickie with Alice.

Eight Minutes Idle has some good jokes to tell and Thorne's deadpan style delivers the punchlines with panache. The tone is outrageously even, hardly wavering between, say, a eulogy on bus travel and a wonderful late scene in which a drunken team mate disrupts the call centre's karaoke night by performing a striptease, until KOed by an empty beer bottle. Dan comes to the rescue in that instance.

His team mates - Ian, Gordon, Adrienne, Teri - make up a ragged chorus whose function should be to knock some decency into Dan, but Dan is a little too quick for them, and perhaps for us. One of Thorne's best devices is a series of mock-diaries, communally concocted in the idle minutes between calls, in which out-of-favour workmates are recast as sexual neurotics, obsessively recording their dysfunctions.

When Dan's affair with Alice is subjected to this treatment, we waver between mockery and grudging sympathy. Dan's portrayal is a tightrope act of considerable flair; we need to like him, but not too much.

It all comes to a head when we learn that some of his debts represent compensation payments to Sonia ("the GBH girl", a running gag), whom he beat up at college. The full tale is told, complete with unbidden erections and repressed Oedipal longings, to one of Dan's father's support group.

Dan's unvarnished account of what he suffered at Sonia's hands (and she at his) forms the slender moral pillar which hauls Thorne's canvas clear of the charge of misogyny. The whole book seems to take a sigh of relief.

Otherwise, Eight Minutes Idle is unabashed in its amorality, which is to say that there is a tremendous amount of explicit sex in it. This is good, and Thorne is smart enough not to reach through the juicy bits for any spurious validating ethos. In this respect, the portrait of Sonia, who never appears in propria persona, is a perfectly judged blend of titillation and menace.

To sustain such a story over a book of this length signals a gravity- defying performance. Even so, Eight Minutes Idle never lets on quite how smart it is. Thorne's best effects accumulate slowly through recurring motifs, and the rhythm of the various narratives is minutely controlled. None of it would work, however, without the book's unlikeliest success: horny, skint, soft, silly, dumb, double-dealing Dan. In the end, he is the tyke we cannot help but like.

The end comes fast. Teri disappears, Dad dies, and Dan cries. A back- story involving Dan's fearsome expat mother has been forcing its way into the foreground for 70 pages or so. Might there be a sequel in the works? Bring it on.

Lawrence Norfolk has co- edited, with Tibor Fischer, the anthology `New Writing 8' (Vintage, pounds 7.99)