This luminous debut novel, set in a squalid, hyper-hedonistic Glasgow, is a wild and gratifying literary ride
Tower blocks have formed the narrative spine of many a novel, most notably JG Ballard’s High-Rise, in which the plush new building’s many levels represent the subtle hierarchical differences in a largely middle-class society, which descends into chaos, then total collapse. The 20-storey high-rise in Glaswegian writer Ryan O’Connor’s luminous debut is already condemned when we enter it, occupied only by junkies, a few marginal stragglers – “forgotten sentinels hovering behind clouds or sunlight reflecting off the glass, like ghost figures in double negatives” – and the novel’s unnamed 30-year-old narrator.
After an opening that suggests an anti-gentrification story is about to unfold, there comes the first of many unexpected tonal shifts. The backstory of our hapless, hopeless host – a sometime journalist whose specialist subject is the pursuit of oblivion – is slowly revealed via a picaresque journey into an alternative, hyper-hedonistic Glasgow, in episodes involving a heroic intake of drink and drugs. Some are comic, others tragic, but all end up somewhere degraded and regretful: a drug den, a brothel, a funeral. We see relationships form, falter fleetingly and then collapse dramatically as bottles get smashed and our protagonist embarks on another round of bad decisions and blackouts.
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