Simon Nolan

In this novel four student dropouts, the sort of people for whom irony is a primal instinct, find themselves in possession of a massive quantity of cocaine. Despite the world-weary superciliousness they all exude, they have an almost touching innocence when it comes to hard drugs (‘they’re not actually addictive are they?’). So of course they snort it (despite their impoverished circumstances there’s always a fiver ready to be rolled up and applied to a nostril). Their downward spiral is readily predicted, but it was worth noting that as they were stoned into sincerity, their irony all but evaporated. Now that’s ironic.

It’s very funny in small bursts with some keenly observed details that were amongst the best I have read in a while. On the whole, though, I wasn’t overly taken with it. The point of view skips around randomly – as a reader I didn’t enjoy being catapulted into the heads of characters I hadn’t got to know properly. And the absence of full-stops for about a third of the book suggested the typesetters had their minds on other things.

It’s the sort of cautionary tale that makes you feel smugly glad if you haven’t taken hard drugs, but way too explicit to be read to pre-teens in the hope of educating them. Not a high star rating from me, because essentially I wasn’t too bothered what happened to any of the characters and could have stopped halfway without the slightest twinge of curiosity.… (meer)