Little Green Man
Simon Armitage Viking, 256pp, £12.99
ISBN 0670894427
For one whose literary talents include poetry, plays, radio and even a pseudo-autobiography, All Points North (Viking), it comes as something of a surprise that it has taken Simon Armitage this long to produce his first novel. Never short of an incisive idiom or concise conceit in his verse, Armitage the novelist is more restrained than Armitage the poet, the tone more personal. He does not reach out and embrace the reader directly as in his previous works.
Perhaps the subject matter of this novel demands a quieter approach. Separated from his wife, Barney is left with an uneasy, unfulfilled relationship with his autistic son. Unable to live his youth vicariously through the absent boy, he retreats into the past, recalling the childhood games he used to play with four friends, with whom he is still in close contact. The result is an elaborate "game" involving ever more dangerous dares. The prize towards which they are working is a jade statue of a little green man that Barney found in the attic. It is worth a tidy £750,000 and serves at once as an emblem of the past and of lost innocence in adulthood. As the challenges and dares become ever more outrageous, the mood darkens and the friends' relationship spirals out of control.
Barney's past is revealed in snapshots, softer moments to counter the laddish veneer of the main body of the narrative, with its football banter and juvenile pranks.
Childhood regression is not in itself an original subject, but Armitage's narrative control is impressive. His characters are convincing, recognisable amalgamations of partially formed memories who hide behind their adolescent sobriquets: Tony Football, Stubbs, Pompus and Winkie. There are delightful moments - the italicised lists of childhood memories; a propensity to slip into the present tense at moments of revelation; and the loving detail devoted to Barney's Subbuteo set. Armitage magnifies the mundane, and is both funny and tender without being sentimental.
If there is a problem, it is that he seems too preoccupied with the mechanics of the form of his own novel, often glossing over important issues. The presence of Barney's autistic son seems no more than a contrivance, another glitch in the imperfect existence of a man who would rather be a child himself than confront adult responsibility.
There is, too, none of the glorious wordplay on which Armitage established his reputation as a poet, and little of his characteristic inventive syntax. Little Green Man is neither as entertaining nor provocative as it might have been, but it lays the foundations of a promising career as a novelist, something more to add to Armitage's already impressive CV.
Alex Gibbons works on the New Statesman books desk
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