You looked forward to it for months and then it came and suddenly it was

You looked forward to it for months, and then it came, and suddenly it was teatime, and your Dalek was broken, and Grandpa was snoring in his armchair looking more dead than he did when he was dead, and it was dusk outside and not even snowing, and you found yourself irretrievably sad and diminished.Now it’s New Year. “Holiday visit, is it, sir?” “Oui.” “And what is your attitude to oxtail, yellow cigarettes, doorsteps, Roquefort cheese, wine made in filthy oak casks from nasty grapes with mould on? Hmm?” “I like these things.” “Right Piss off. Fools, Morons, cone-heads, nebbishes Parp-parp! Three .. two .. one .. RAAAAY! RAAAAY! Shud OLE dakwaince BEEF ergot .. Hughie! Ruuuuth! Bleeeuch!

Yik. Reality, please, maestro, and while we are at it, let’s ban Trafalgar Square, why not? Significant risk of accident, I’d say, and I bet “Dr” Jack Cunningham, the Amazing Hair-Trigger Man, would agree too, if he’d just lift his head for a moment from his copy of The Boy’s Book of Horrible Animal Stuff.
Ban it! Ban it! And if the rest of Europe doesn’t fall into line, ban them, too Turn them back at the borders. Everyone’s caning it, blasted, chopping `em out – the problem being that, like other people’s dreams, other people’s drug experiences are rarely very interesting unless you’re in them.Next to Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, for example – which gently yet relentlessly pulled apart the empty world of cocaine chic – Cocaine has all the moral subtleties of an episode of The Cosby Show. As the Grandmaster Melle Mel, whose hit “White Lines” is never far from the mixing deck in Cocaine, said: “Don’t do it!”..

Strongman’s musings – on the nine levels of sexual pleasure, for example – have an air of High Fidelity, with none of Nick Hornby’s talent for observation. Pete’s youthfully knowing teenage girlfriend is a faded version of Diane in Trainspotting, with far-fetched psychotic tendencies for added thriller potential. His criminals, meanwhile, are straight out of a gangsta-rap video, and as chilling as a Mark Morrison lyric.Strongman has his moments, but like a glut of similar novels, Cocaine owes everything to the emerging literary boys’ club for the chemical generation presided over by Irvine Welsh. At others he’s as two-dimensional as an article in Loaded, preoccupied with sex, hedonism and and flattering himself that every woman in the room has fallen for his jaded, substance- abusing charms: “This stuff was mind-blowingly strong … Even passing water was a stunning experience …”The book’s catchphrase, liberally used, is “yeah, yeah, yeah,” but it is we and not Pete, who have seen it all before and seen it done better. But Strongman cannot seem to decide whether his anti-hero, Pete, is an innocent lost in evil world of crime barons, or a cynical seen- it-all hack whose own scruples are as dubious as the shadowy figures he is trying to expose with his “scoop” on how cocaine launched a boy band.At times it feels like Pete’s trapped in a Pulp song – sorted, nice one, diamond geezer – without the irony.

The simultaneously glitzy and shabby milieu of the showbiz launch, where people engaging in conversation are constantly scanning the crowd for someone of greater celebrity or holding better drugs, is evoked convincingly enough. But although it is set against a Soho `97 backdrop of Mezzo and The Wag, what Strongman actually delivers is a deeply old-fashioned narrative, trapped somewhere between airport novel and boys’-own fantasy.In a seamy tale of how cocaine makes the music industry go round, the world of the ligger – the professionally guest-listed hanger-on who attends endless champagne parties always at someone else’s expense – is laid bare. COCAINE by Phil Strongman Abacus pounds 9.99

At the 1996 Brit awards, the old dear Mrs Merton peered over her glasses and said: “Has anyone here see Charlie? It’s just everybody backstage seems to be looking for him.” In Cocaine, Phil Strongman, a former music journalist, takes that joke, spins it out over 250 pages, and, by cutting it with a heavy dose of white-powder paranoia, tries to turn it into a “a contempo music-biz reality” thriller.
With its psychedelic sick-coloured jacket and silver lettering, Cocaine promises to be a streetwise and stylish cautionary tale for the Nineties. These two inarticulate, emotionally repressed men communicate through their efforts to rebuild Billy’s house: “Our gaff – our gaff, if you don’t mind”.

Their cosy domesticity is not entirely believable, but over cans of beer, they realise that their self-enforced imprisonment is not merely literal: “The truth is he reminded me of myself.” If O’Connor has a schematic take on exposition perhaps it is because it is more important to him that Billy should be finally able to despatch the ghosts of retribution and face his future with a forgiving heart.. As the journal becomes more ruminative, feeling seeps back into both men’s shattered lives, and an edgy companionship evolves.O’Connor skilfully negotiates their reconciliation. He hires a hit man to beat Quinn unconscious, then imprisons him in the aviary at the bottom of his garden But then Billy’s fatal flaw kicks in. He is weak: Grace knew it and told him repeatedly, now his story turns on it. Mental torture is not really his game, and soon Quinn manipulates his way out of the cage and into Billy’s house But Quinn has reached a turning point, too.