The Hard Shoulder [Paperback]

The central character O'Grady is an Irishman, who has just been released from prison. As the novel opens we find him making his way to his sister's boarding house (via a few of his old watering holes) in Kilburn. He has reconciled himself to a quiet life, odd jobbing for his devout sister and leaving the past well alone. But he is crippled by indecision, and rudderless, is soon straying from the 'Bleanyish' life plan he had sketched out for himself on the inside. Shaughnessy, a boarder at his sister's and a classic chancer (who has not so much kissed the Blarney stone as slipped it the tongue) soon finds out about O'Grady's past. Weak and indecisive, O'Grady, despite his distrust and dislike of Shaughnessy, forms an uneasy alliance with him. What follows is a compelling story of O'Grady's attempts to come to terms with his past and with a present in which he is anchorless and without bearings

Set in a North West London on the cusp of post war dereliction and the Thatcherite gentrification of the mid-1980's, the novel evokes a time of social change with deftness and great perception. A lesser writer would have ham fistedly crammed the text with references to this time period, Petit with his perfect pitch, his unfailing gift for writing the city, does not have to. He captures the contingency, the complete fluidity of the urban, perfectly.

Petit started out as a film maker, (he directed the cult British road movie 'Radio On') and there is a film makers sensibility at work in this novel. It has the structure of a film, he writes scenes with an eye for tone and the inconsequential but telling detail. His prose is taut and almost ruthless in its uncompromising rejection of the showy. The dialogue is effortlessly on the money (if Petit isn't Irish, then clearly he has sought their company - I write this as a Irishman myself) This is ultimately what gives such authenticity to the character of O'Grady. We watch him drowning in his own deep sense of worthlessness, crippled by an inability to act decisively, beset by uncertainty and the culturally imposed humility of old catholic Ireland. Yet for all this he is saintly too, a mundane saint, but a saint nonetheless. The novel ends with O'Grady going literally nowhere in a Merc, dreaming of a bright new beginning in some airport departure lounge, a metaphor for Celtic Tiger Ireland perhaps.

Written with such unerring feel for character, time and place, 'The Hard Shoulder' deserves a wide readership.

With this novel one gets a vague sense that O'Grady is dead and that the world he moves within is no so distanced from hell. The observations of Kilburn life are brilliantly done, an area in which before the war houses 'passed hands for £20'.

Do read this book. Though it is very depressing indeed - the ending is up there with 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold' - there is much good stuff in it and one looks forward to whatever next this interesting writer creates.