Sometimes I feel this column can be slightly how can I put this? demanding. I recommend first-time experimental Lithuanian novels, 900-page works of history, early 20th-century wordless books composed entirely of woodcuts. Every so often, I even try to press poetry upon you.
But now and again I like to kick my shoes off and relax, to read something which doesn't want to win the Booker or the Nobel, where the author does not curse a fickle and ignorant public for not recognising him as the next Samuel Beckett. Then again, neither do I want to have my intelligence insulted. It's a fine line.
Such a novel is this one. It's straightforward enough: five men, 40-ish, get together every month at one of their houses for a long game of poker. And that would be that, but Tom Campbell makes it a comedy of manners by turning up the tensions between their differing social and financial positions. So we have: (1) The unreflective but undeniably successful entrepreneur, motivated by quotes from Arnold Palmer ("the more I practise, the luckier I get", and so on). (2) The accountant with a mind like a calculator (who also happens to be of Indian descent). (3) The weird academic a philosophy don at Reading University. (4) The hopeless rabbit (the technical term for the worst, most easily spooked player at a poker table) who can't even get his wife pregnant, and (5) the even more hopeless rabbit, the screwed-up, over-analysing failure, an escapee from an early Martin Amis novel, perhaps ditched for not being quite grotesque enough, who somehow does everything wrong, and who is the narrative centre of the book. One evening, (1) makes a gesture of spectacular condescension to (5), who decides, after recovering from the humiliation, to get his revenge to, if one may use the italicised Amisian formula for these occasions, fuck him up.
This does look rather well, formulaic, I concede. There is indeed something contrived about it these people might look pretty much the same to you if you were from, say, the Trobriand Islands, but I found myself wondering how they might have met up in the first place, had the author not put them all round the table together himself.
Still, there they are, and off we go. And the thing about it is, Campbell makes you want to read the next page. It's as simple as that. His sentences have a snap to them. The rhetoric is familiar. "None of the men at his [gyms] wanted to look like that they all wanted well-defined stomachs and to look pretty. In fact, what they really all wanted was to look like girls." Or: "So his house was not going to intimidate them. In fact, nowadays, the only person it intimidated was himself." (The first quote is from the point of view of (1), who looks like a rugby player; the second from the PoV of (5) who, being a teacher, has more or less thrown his life away and is living in a shabby street whose shops include a "shamelessly disgusting Chinese takeaway".)
This is not a problem, really. It would be if the book had ideas above its station, but it doesn't. What it is good at being is a book; ie if it were turned into a film, it would lose much. It is very good on the sub-surface: its perspectives rotate, like the dealership round a card table. It has the courage to be unpleasant about its characters, and the heart to challenge that unpleasantness. It is, in fact, cleverer than it lets on.
If it has a problem, it is that it will not appeal, at first glance, to women the mise en scène is inescapably blokey. (Ignorance of the rules of poker need not be a hindrance; but if you know someone who plays poker but does not read, they may well like this.) But it would be a shame if women didn't read it, for it is a useful guide to what goes through the contemporary middle-class British man's head, which is perhaps one reason why even with five characters in it the book barely makes it over the 200-page mark.
