Wreckage

In this follow-up to his 2005 novel Stump, Griffiths again offers a vision of Liverpool and its inhabitants, doing for the city what Joyce did for Dublin, albeit more violently. Darren and Alastair, two Liverpudlian thugs, rob a post office in a small village in Wales. Darren bludgeons the old lady postmaster within an inch of her life while Alastair weakly protests, and the pair makes off with four thousand pounds in cash. Greedy and fed up with his psychopathic partner, Alastair conscripts two younger thugs to help him steal the four thousand pounds from Darren. Of course, they take all the money for themselves, leaving both Darren and Alastair unconscious and bleeding on the wet sidewalk. When they come to, they're broke, in deep trouble with mob boss Tommy, and responsible for a crime that has drawn the attention and disgust of the entire U.K. The story is told in rotating narratives that offer the voices (in varying degrees of dialect) of nearly every character that crosses paths with Darren and Alastair, including their victims, a whore, a drunk and a pompous poet. Though the plot turns on drugs and violence, Griffith's lyrical and funny prose inoculates him against any charge that he's merely following the path that Trainspotting cut for British novelists who don't write about London.