THE KILLING JAR
by Nicola Monaghan
Chatto, £11.99; 288pp

SEX, DRUGS AND alienation abound in these two accomplished debut novels. But the similarities end there.

Bhupinder (aka Puppy), the Sikh narrator of Tourism, is 29 and “completely jaded”. He is also smitten by Sarupa, a vivacious commercial lawyer, who is way out of his league. Puppy’s malaise began during his childhood in Southall when his father beat his mother, was serially unfaithful and eventually walked out on the family.

At school Puppy was bullied and a deep resentment of his white classmates wells up in him whenever he thinks of those days. Since dropping out of university he has sponged off his mother and wasted time, money and his “precious little self-respect”. He occasionally works as a journalist writing on “men’s grooming”.

His fortunes appear to change when he meets Sophie, a cousin of Sarupa’s fiancé and wannabe model (“a week’s fast from being skeletal”). Puppy exchanges his dilapidated flat in Hackney for Sophie’s in Holland Park, with the intention of getting closer to Sarupa. He is invited to her Cotswold mansion for a drug-fuelled house party but the experience leaves him feeling “hollowed” and with a sense of “looming sorrow” because he realises how different their worlds are.

Despite Puppy’s laddishness, the novel proves to be witty, insightful and often beautifully written. Its vivid descriptions of London and the Cotswolds belie his claim that he lacks “creativity”. He satirises a range of victims, from West Indian crack dealers wobbling around Hackney “on bicycles built for children” to Asian capitalists being wooed by Tony and Cherie (“she gurned at the camera with a nervous smile”).

The setting of The Killing Jar, the run-down Broxtowe estate in Nottingham where Monaghan grew up, is far more chilling than Dhaliwal’s London. The story is narrated in dialect by Kerrie-Ann and covers her childhood and adolescence. She begins by telling us how she befriended an elderly Russian neighbour, Mrs Ivanovich, when she was 5.

Mrs Ivanovich is fascinated by entomology and inspires Kerrie-Ann to value learning, something that helps her when she is older. Yet hope is often accompanied by despair. Mrs Ivanovich suffers from “sore old bones” and cannot face another winter. She commits suicide using the chemical wiith which she suffocated butterflies, potassium cyanide. Kerrie-Ann sees her body.

The killing jar is a metaphor for the corrosive life from which Kerrie-Ann yearns to escape. Her mother is a heroin addict (“a junkie first, not a mam”) and occasional prostitute (at 10, Kerrie-Ann realises that her unknown father must have “paid for the privilege”). One of her mother’s boyfriends puts Kerrie-Ann to work selling drugs with the justification that she is too young to be prosecuted. When she is beaten up, her wounds are treated with heroin. As her mum says: “We can’t tek yer to hospital . . . They’d tek yer off me.”

Kerrie-Ann’s tortured path to redemption involves her being exploited by a paedophile who makes her pregnant, doing time in a young offenders’ prison, and having a long-term relationship with a psychopathic murderer. She explains that before she found the strength to break free, the psychological effects of manipulative men and drugs had forced her to wonder “how I could tell what was real and what wasn’t”.

Monaghan’s novel is direct and deceptively simple. In spite of the suffering there are surprising touches of humour and tenderness that bloom like flowers on asphalt. Nevertheless, her determination to portray Kerrie-Ann as a perpetual victim could overstretch the sympathies of some readers.

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