A series of psychotic reviews

Even though I feel The White Tiger is a little slight as a Booker winner - and it does employ many of the same tricks as The Reluctant Fundamentalist on last year's shortlist - I don't think it undermines what I think this year's Prize has eloquently illustrated: 2008 has been a great year for fiction, with the lack of big names hogging the limelight allowing some new talent to impress itself upon the general public's goldfish consciousness.

But the proof copies of new titles are mounting up in piles which have already begun to teeter hazardously, so I thought I'd better start finding out how 2009 is likely to compare. I was tempted by Tim Gautreaux's The Missing, but getting that out would have been too much like a game of Jenga, so I began with Viking's big hope for the forthcoming year, Mr Toppit by Charles Elton.

Even the proofs reflect their grand ambitions: they have dust jackets, die-cut to reveal a detail of another design on the book itself. (Finished copies will be the same, except in hardback format.) There is a purpose to this exorbitance, however, because it is a book about a book, or rather a series of books.

So, the premise: Arthur Hayman was a writer of children's books, the five volumes of the Hayseed Chronicles, which are to become incredibly popular when championed by the American hospital radio presenter who tended him as he lay dying after a road accident. Their main character, Luke, is named after the writer's son, who is later to struggle to come to terms with the public's insistence on identifying him with his literary equivalent. The eponymous Mr Toppit is the baddie of the series, a malevolent omnipresence, who makes a first appearance in the enigmatic last line of the last book; he functions like a diametric opposite to Narnia's Aslan. Luke's discomfort echoes that of A A Milne's son, Christopher, and the furore surrounding the Hayseed Chronicles is modelled on Pottermania.

I don't really like to lay into books too often, especially first efforts, but it has two flaws: the characters and the plot.

As the book vacillates between various points in Luke's growing up, you would expect both he and the other central characters to display some sort of development in their personalities, but they are invariably one-dimensional. Luke himself is perpetually surly, never progressing beyond the functional uncommunicativeness of adolescence. His sister, Rachel, is dippy, easily led and impressed by glamour. Their mother, Martha, is numb and obstinate. Lila, the books' original illustrator, is insensitive and autistically monomaniacal. And Laurie, the American radio presenter, is clumsy in word and deed, caught up in the moment's tide.

It is Laurie, too, who is the weak link in terms of the plot. When the family return to their country home to prepare for Arthur's funeral, this stranger to them all comes along. It's utterly implausible. There's a muddy reference to the family's not objecting, but it seems such socially aggressive behaviour that meek Laurie can't be imagined imposing herself unchallenged. In the subsequent days, Martha dismisses intrusions on the family's grief with a distinct brusqueness on several occasions, but she never objects to Laurie.

Laurie's later progression from hospital radio volunteer to nationally-broadcast chat show host is glossed over in much the same way. It's too remarkable, and frankly unlikely, a development not to require some sort of explanation. And this is symptomatic of the plot throughout: Laurie, Luke and, more intermittently Rachel all turn up and do their narrative duty in isolation from any psychological context.

The plot's one heart-stopping revelation passes almost as an aside, as if all the participants are so wearily accustomed to their lots that it is meaningless. Maybe that's what was intended, but it does rather indicate that the plot itself is fairly directionless, a weak illustration of existential resignation. A poor book from which I feel it is my duty as a bookseller to usher you away.

Still, I don't think I need fear for I might have trampled the delicate flower of some blossoming talent: the author's a literary agent and therefore has the hide of a rhinoceros in leather trousers. My theory is that a great concept has got Penguin so excited that they're blind to the fact that its execution falls very short of its potential. It really is a bad book, so bad it ought to be sent to bed without any supper.

Tearing one book to pieces has given me a vandal's adrenaline surge. So shall we trash another one? I'll probably regret it in the morning, but let's not let ourselves be inhibited in the moment.

The book is Michelle Richmond's No One You Know, due next June as part of Ebury's first big fiction year. It's her first to be published in the UK, but in the US, it's been her mystifyingly well-received fourth, I believe.

It's a thriller, in which Ellie confides all her sorrows to her tutor, Andrew Thorpe, following the murder of her sister, Lila, only to find that he has been accumulating material for a book on the murder case. In it, he reveals his main suspect for the crime, Peter McConnell. When he is acquitted, Ellie is bereft. She has been betrayed by a man she thought was her rock, she has lost her only, very dear sibling, her parents' marriage has crumbled and she doesn't even have the hollow satisfaction of justice. For some time she monitors McConnell, observing him from the far side of the restaurant where he always eats, but eventually he disappears.

Many years later, as a coffee buyer travelling to Nicaragua, she stumbles across him. He had been with Lila on the night she disappeared. The two of them had been working for some time on a solution to a famous mathematical conundrum, Goldbach's Conjecture - and McConnell, it later transpires, succeeded in doing so, although that implausible outcome seems to be permitted to allow McConnell to pay tribute to Lila - and were having an affair. This additional disgrace costs McConnell his family and flees to seclusion in the realm of mathematical theory. He protests his innocence and Ellie is persuaded that the guilty party is still to be identified. She finds Thorpe again and investigates some of the minor players whom Thorpe passed over in his version of Lila's life and death.

The overall story works well enough, even if the narrative is rather too simple to satisfy as a whodunit of any species. But there are some plot points which don't ring true, some inconsequential, some fundamental. An example of the former occurs on Ellie's first buying trip: although she has a couple of years' experience as a coffee taster, it is supposedly a remarkable revelation to her that it takes 2000 coffee cherries to produce a pound of coffee. And, more reprehensibly, an example of the latter would Ellie's complete failure to comment on, or even notice, Thorpe's constant note-taking when she talks to him about her sister's murder. I started jotting these incongruities down, because at the time I thought I might be missing something, but I stopped after seventy or so pages when it became clear that the book was fundamentally flawed, or at least carelessly edited.

When the final twist came, I presumed that it was a red herring, as there were still over fifty pages to read, but instead it just wound down over almost a sixth of the book. It made me think of Bartledan, the emotionless planet in Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless, where all novels finish after exactly 100,000 words, even if that occurs mid-sentence.

I think I should go a little way to undoing the damage that I have wrought by highlighting a decent book. As a bookseller, I can hardly send people away without recommending something. So Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward, published by Faber in April, is bloody marvellous. Reading in the blurb that he'd written it in the form of one continuous paragraph - it's nearly 300 pages - nearly put me off, but the book both justifies the effect and makes the most of it.

Its characters live in a run-down council block, all living lives of drugs, violence and false hope. Some of the cruder opening scenes were uncomfortably like much of Irvine Welsh's Filth - a book as dire as Trainspotting is sublime - but it's a book full of nuance and wit, allowing its characters' true natures to chivvy the plot along with just enough impetus to reach a cathartically moving conclusion.

By the way, it's his second book, he's twenty-three and the film rights to his first have just been bought by Hollywood. And he's nice, utterly lovely in fact. Tch!

On the subject of new talent, I've found it disappointing that so much new radio comedy over the last couple of years has been so turgid and clunking, the first Laura Solon series and most episodes of Ed Reardon's Week aside, that my ears were fair twitching with pleasure on hearing Radio 7's 15-minute sketch show on Sundays, A Series of Psychotic Episodes.

It's a little raw in its both writing and presentation, but the humour is so sharply original that it seems apparent already that its writer, Miriam Elia, is going to be a star (or at least constantly passed over by commissioning editors in favour of supposedly 'edgy' attention-seeking dross). Episodes are available for the time being on the BBC website and it's worth a listen for, amongst my favourites, the sketch 'Postmodern Pat and his Abstract Cat' and this wonderful line:

Were you born in the eighties? Then you may be entitled to compensation.

ηὕρηκα

Harry Potter En Die Towenaar Se Steen

I've been exploring Borders' website, to see what their relaunch has to offer. One new feature is their Spookily Accurate Book Suggestor.

They have the same problem as Amazon, at least with fiction, in that most of their suggestions are books by the same author, particularly when straying even slightly from the mainstream. Hunger by Knut Hamsen, for instance, produced a list of his other books, with a couple of plays by Ibsen for good measure.

The oddest result came when I entered Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, paperback edition. It responded with five suggestions: Chamber of Secrets in hardback, Philosopher's Stone on CD, Half-Blood Prince on cassette, one of the series - perhaps the first, but I couldn't say with any certainty - in Afrikaans and, finally, most surreally, The Story of Jazz by Franck Bergerot and Arnaud Merlin.

I think I'll go back to the endearingly ill-conceived storycode.co.uk. It may suggest The Poisonwood Bible every single time, but at least it's a good suggestion.

I've just read a debut coming-of-age novel by Peter Murphy, John the Revelator. I'm wary of such books, as so many of them are thinly disguised autobiographies, the sort of novels which one would hope a good writer might get out of his system and then place in a drawer, there to lie undisturbed until death and a publisher's scraping around for enlightening juvenalia. But Murphy is Faber's 'distinctive new voice' for spring and will be present at a new authors' party in a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd see if the book did indeed "brilliantly evoke all the frustrations and pent-up energy of parochial adolescence", as the blurb claims.

I duly ticked off the usual list: a lack of parental understanding, a charismatically rebellious friend, a knowing adult who appears genie-like when required to dispense advice, drunken adventures gone awry and unsolicited fantasy sex with a beautiful older woman. The trouble is that, beyond this, one is left only with some strange dreams involving a particularly sinister crow. The writing's good, I'll concede, really remarkably assured in fact, with some nice phrasing and switches of pace, but that's not quite enough: he's not John Banville.

I’ve also been reading Belching out the Devil by Mark Thomas, which exposes the world's most recognised brand - Coca-Cola if you hadn't guessed - as a company keen enough on profits to wash their hands of all manner of corporate impropriety, starting with turning a blind eye to guerrilla assassination of Union members in Colombia and not really getting any less horrific in any later chapter.

Now, I'm not naive enough to imagine that the moral footprint of my comfortable western lifestyle doesn't have its cloven aspect, but I feel that I'm learning about the realities of capitalism and making my choices accordingly. And what I don't do is stand in the way of justice or fairness. Coca-Cola do, to make more money. They want their brand to stand for American values and so we perceive that it does. But we don't look closely enough at how they interpret those values. They don't stand for opportunity and freedom, but for exploitation and control, and modern capitalism doesn't really distinguish.

Nestlé's new Munch Bunch advert sees them up to their usual dissembling too. A portion of their yoghurt, the ad garishly proclaims, provides a child's entire daily calcium requirement. But it says in tiny print at the bottom of the screen that 'one portion' is two pots. And on the website, I can't find the disclaimer at all.

Now, I know that's fairly minor sin in the annals of corporate deceit, but it does exemplify the willingness of big business to use legislation introduced to curb their excesses to claim that they are entirely compliant with society's wishes not be misled. Technically, they might be right, but morally, a term which is of course unquantifiable, it's perhaps worse than just lying in the first place.

It's just the same with their infamous baby milk misdemeanours, the principal reason why I boycott Nestlé. Once the problem was exposed, they assured the world that their sales reps would be retrained and that African mothers would not be told that formula was better than breast milk. When an undercover reporter revealed that it was still happening, they were able to claim that rogue agents were disobeying head office instructions. The number of agents involved suggests this is implausible, but on paper, they're off the hook....

Some months ago I spoke with a journalist who played a part in exposing Gap factories in the far East as using child labour. Gap immediately terminated business with the offending supplier. Did they know about it before the newspaper splash, I asked. I was told that of course they did and that if there were others they probably knew but wouldn't do anything about it until the next scandal, at which point they could again throw up their hands in horror and prove themselves to be the responsible international investors they hope we all believe them to be. And the worst thing is, I wasn't shocked.

How is it that we have allowed the technicalities of our legal corpus to define what is right and wrong? It is at the behest of big business and companies such as Nestlé and Gap now hold more political power than any government. (Speaking of which, how can any MP defend with a straight face a system with enough loopholes to allow Margaret Beckett to spend £2000 on the garden of her heavily subsidised second home, to pick just one of many - admittedly disturbingly Richard 'hell-in-a-handcart' Littlejohnesque - examples? Do they not understand that we don't care whether or not the rules allow it; what we object to is that she's blatantly taking the piss.)

It's probably unwise to lay into Nestlé or Gap on this blog. They strike me as the litigious type - multinational corporations seem to have much the same attitude to quelling dissent as mediaeval monarchs – and they can probably afford better lawyers than I.

Oh sod it, who cares? Let's go for broke. MacDonalds serve BSE-infected spinal cords in baps and Catherine Zeta Jones keeps her youthful looks by drinking the blood of enslaved orphans.

Meanwhile, Marks & Spencer appear to have hit upon the idea of using the insufferable Piers Morgan, in full-on smug mode, as the voice of their latest advertising campaign: "It's my opinion, and therefore a fact...". The boycott starts here.