Bad news from Cassandra

ALMOST every writer has a manuscript like First Time languishing in a bottom drawer. The tragedy of such halting early attempts at fiction is not that they remain unpublished, but that they might one day see the light of the day.

Lara Harte is 19. Phoenix House should know better.

First Time, a first novel, is about friendless 14 year old Cassandra, who is adopted by a new girl, working class Emma, at her "exclusive all girls' private secondary school" in Dublin, and is subsequently betrayed by her.

In between, there is a round of under age drinking binges, some squalid teenage dating rituals, a short lived pregnancy scare and a bit of dope thrown in for good measure. There's a bit of effing and blinding, too. Imagine the four Marys in a head on collision with Trainspotting.

Unwittingly, Harte has pinpointed the weakness of her own work by putting it in the mouth of her heroine. Cassandra, describing rough trade Emma's plight after she is unmasked and boycotted by her "posh" school friends, says it is "the stuff of true life drama, sensationalised fiction, a teenage girl's worst nightmare, naive young girl exploited".

And that, unfortunately, is what First Time is. It possesses all the longueurs of juvenile writing - a sour and spoiled tone of voice, a tedious solipsism and a total absence of humour. There is also a great deal of unconscious class snobbery.

As a social documentary of the mores of middle class teenagers, First Time has some passing value. Harte can certainly not be accused of sentimentalism. The awful impoverishment of adolescent socialising could hardly be more starkly drawn. The girls in First Time consider as the height of coolness drinking a few tinnies and smoking in a lane behind a chipper - "knacker drinking" - while they wait for long haired and inarticulate louts to happen along. Indeed, to use the jargon of the book, this is "deadly".

And Harte is also good on the defiant, self justifying insecurity of adolescence, the epical self pity of it all - "My God, I don't care that she hates me. It used to hurt me, even though I didn't like her, because I wanted people to like me and anyone's dislike hurt. Now, I don't give a shit if the whole world hates me because if they're all like that then they're not worth it."

But none of this feeling gets translated into fiction. There is no character development, not much plot, no pace, no drama.

Buried in the middle of this turgid and undistilled prose lies a real story about childhood bullying which Cassandra refers to only in passing but which, if developed, might have turned First Time into a novel.

Whether Lara Harte can write remains to be seen. Her tough, uncompromising approach to her subject matter and her spare style need testing in a work that is less self obsessed than this one.

Meanwhile, First Time reads like a peek into a teenager's diary. And the reader is left feeling she shouldn't have been allowed to see it in the first place.