Fighting Irish

Poet Nick Laird's first novel is a comic tale of an Ulsterman's escapades in a sharply-observed London,

It seems to be the season for Irishmen on the make in London. In Woody Allen's Match Point, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers navigates London's toniest dining clubs and hisses his way up its corporate ladder. No one can accuse Danny Williams, the hero of Nick Laird's Utterly Monkey, of that. Sure he works as a lawyer in the City, but his firm is the kind of place that's decorated with synthetic plants and oak veneer cabinets, its lawyers all lined up "like teeth, yellowy pale, varying in sharpness, and renewable". His routine is enlivened only by his crush on Ellen, a young black trainee in the litigation department with a "posh bone-dry voice", a pinstriped shirt and one slightly askew front tooth – the blemish male novelists still deploy to keep their women real, Lauren Hutton will be pleased to note.

Danny's pursuit of Ellen is hardly smooth–- all agonising pauses, furtive glances and bashful passes – but what chance he has is severely jeopardised by the arrival of his old friend Geordie, who shows up on the doorstep of Danny's small flat in a cloud of beer fumes and smoke, trailing all sorts of embarrassing stories from Danny's teenage past in Ulster, and promptly makes himself at home. He also arrives with a white plastic bag full of banknotes that don't belong to him, thus signing up the plot for that action-adventure bylaw, most famously exemplified in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, which states: any pile of money, stolen from a gang of thugs and carted to London in a plastic bag, will invariably result in the return of said bag – plus its carrier and the friends on whose couch he's crashing – back to its place of origin for a severe pummeling.

What follows is a boisterous caper that scampers from London to Ulster- "that little patch of scorched earth" – where Danny checks into the Europa Hotel in Belfast, an establishment "kept from the top spot of The Most Bombed Hotel in the World by some place in Tel Aviv".

Fans of the BBC sitcom The Office will find much to enjoy in Laird's dry portrayal of humdrum middle-management life, with its balding apparatchiks and photocopied ennui. But his vision is even sharper when he takes to the streets. There, he observes the light in the window of an insomniac, which is seemingly a requirement for every London street, just as "each road also required a single extinguished streetlight, the puzzle of a broken chair on the pavement and one locked-out tenant trying to wake his slumberous flatmate".

Laird published a volume of poetry before Utterly Monkey, his first novel, and it shows in his vivid, off-the-cuff phrases: "the contralto and baritone of a drunken street argument", "the outdoor symphony of traffic", or the recently poured pint of Guinness that becomes a "storm in a pint glass, the spindrift apartheid of grains and galaxies settling". Laird also happens to be good on lust. We have grown so used to a certain type of novel written by young British authors – one sodden with self-disgust and struck dumb with sexual shame – that it comes as a refreshing surprise to find Laird's characters so unabashed in their pursuit of sex, and Laird so energised by the knock-kneed comedy of the result. That we never really get a clear view of Ellen through this fog of male anxiety – she is dropped into Danny's bed and then just as summarily dismissed – seems more a consequence of the plot than evidence of Laird's lack of sympathy for women. His characterisation of Geordie's girlfriend, a checkout girl named Janice, is first-rate, especially the scene in which she assesses herself in the bathroom mirror with a wonderfully level-headed gaze.

Next time around, maybe Laird will ease up on the gas. The plot of Utterly Monkey turns out to hinge on an attempt to blow up the Bank of England – complete with a car chase and ticking bomb – a denouement that struck me as Extra Extra Large. Far more in keeping with Laird's brand of diminutive comedy is the note, written by a terrorist, full of blood and bombast, which ends, "Yours Sincerely, Ian". Laird is more at ease with the threat of violence than the thing itself, and Utterly Monkey simmers away nicely on a black eye or two without need of bombs. The backdrop of the Troubles is never at the front of the stage but never completely dismissed either: when someone casually refers to meeting "the best kneecapping surgeon in the Northern Hemisphere" you find yourself suddenly shivering. Even better is the schoolboy scrape Geordie and Danny remember, which starts off as a hilarious, lung-filling flight from bullies and ends when they stumble across a corpse. Suddenly the two lads on the lam look suspiciously like frightened little boys on the verge of tears.

©New York TImes