Keeping Britain Tidy

Keeping Britain Tidy is a novel about masculinity in a vacuum. Told in a sequence of interlocking monologues, it articulates the lives of a group of young men, out of college, out of work, powered by drink and drugs and sex, trying to find any of it meaningful, pitching towards a tragedy that is as appalling as it is inevitable. Their hatred and violence, against others like them, against women, expose levels of vulnerability with which they cannot cope. It is a violent and wild narrative, cleverly double-stranded, that is by the end, both moving and tragic. No-one is blamed for the tragedy of these young men, not parents, not society, not authority; they are powered by their own emptiness and rage, destructive of those about them, and finally also of themselves. This is a strong first novel that deserves a wide readership.