This is Callow's third novel, which reads more like a short story collection: it's a series of vignettes from the life of the first-person narrator, with no recurring characters other than the narrator and his parents, and with no very clear time-sequence between the episodes (except the first one, where the narrator is still at school). Each episode seems to be a frustrated attempt at life: the narrator is trying out a new occupation, or a new friend, or a potential lover: nothing really terrible happens, but nothing clearly positive comes out of it either. I was expecting it to be an "angry young man" story, but it doesn't really fit into that category at all. The narrator isn't angry, or even baffled, so much as quietly resigned to his life not going anywhere.

If you pick up just about any novel of the fifties and sixties by a British male writer, you will get the impression that all of life took place in pubs, interrupted only by the briefest of interludes of fighting, vomiting, sex and (sometimes) work. Probably unrealistic, if you remember how few hours a day the pubs were open at that time, but that's what the convention dictated. This book, however, goes to the opposite extreme: it doesn't have a single pub scene, and I didn't spot even a passing mention of alcohol or drunkenness. Quite astonishing, but only in comparison with other novels: you wouldn't notice it as an absence if you weren't conditioned to look for it. Instead, we get to spend a lot of time on buses, trains and bikes, and in various workplaces — the engineering works, a telephone exchange, an agricultural work camp. Sex is there, very occasionally, but it's even more fumbly and incompetent than in the Drunken Young Men novels.

There are some nice insights into what work is like, and a lot of very striking, well-written scenes in which nothing much happens. You might occasionally get the feeling that this is someone who has read a bit too much George Orwell and DH Lawrence, but there are worse kinds of influence. ( )