Fiction: Take a group of present-day youths growing up in the suburbs of multicultural London. It is a second- eneration Asian quartet composed of the members of a typical gang.
There is the tough guy with the muscles. Then there's the guy with the big mouth. Group member number three is slightly less self-absorbed than his buddies because festering away in the family home is his brother's impending wedding to a girl yet to find mother's favour. And then there's Jas, our weedy, pathetic, but if only in this company, barely likable narrator.
Outwardly, the boys look different - in that they don't look British. Yet their aggression, clothes, facial and verbal expressions, their attitude, their discontent, mark them out as typical of boys who have done poorly at school, view girls as sex objects ripe for humiliation and have already begun to look elsewhere for the money to buy them the cars, computers and sportswear that apparently confer identity.
Londonstani is yet another wildly hyped deja vu first novel. Horrible, contrived, laboured, predictable and occasionally funnyish, it is important because it is examining what makes modern society - and, equally, what pulls it apart. And, of course, there is the cultural dimension, not that the author, Gautum Malkani, makes the most intelligent use of this element.
The boys hail from emigrant families, albeit families that have long settled in England. The narrator's father owns a mobile phone warehouse. Most of the gang's problems are those shared by aimless, confused, bored teenagers anywhere. At first glance, Malkani appears intent on shaping his own variation of A Clockwork Orange; but he fails through inconsistent execution and sheer casualness.
For all the verve and confidence (bordering on the careless), his chaotic cartoon narrative, with its shades of sub-Martin Amis street satire, slangy obscenities and obvious gags, seldom breaks free of the contrived "f**k"- and "shit"-strewn argot crossed with mobile-phone text-speak in which it is written. The prose shifts between the sub-literate and the archly, knowingly formal. It never achieves the authenticity of James Kelman, nor the consummate authority of Nadeem Aslam's courageous novel, Maps for Lost Lovers. Malkani is too sophisticated to give his story real life. This is a shallow performance, or rather an impersonation. Nor, surprisingly, does Malkani ever move beyond a clichéd version of settled immigrant life.
There are so few insights, aside from an exasperated father's comment late in the novel: "Son, all these things you don't like, they are our custom. All these things you fight about, is about our traditions. Is our custom that we follow the traditions . . . traditions is reason for many things in life."
Although some of the bewilderment expressed by the parents rings true, none of the characters actually convince, apart from the surprise exception of Mr Ashwood, the streetwise history teacher who not only knows what these boys are but also exactly where they are headed, a future which he outlines in one of the better set pieces. When the expected tragedy occurs, it is almost thrown away as, by that stage of the story, Malkani appears to have decided he is writing a comic novel. The problem is, it is not all that funny.
The opening sequence features an horrific beating. "Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck'd, shudn't b callin me a Paki, innit." Thus speaks the heavily muscled, vain, ever-preening Hardjit, who has changed his name by adding a "d". His vicious assault on an offending white youth is graphically reported by Jas, or Jason, the narrator, a weedy chap determined to win the approval of his thuggish companions. As they beat up the white boy, Jason urges them on:
I decided to offer the following, carefully crafted comment: Yeh, breden, know his fuckin teeth out. Bruck his fuckin face. Kill his fuckin . . . well, his fuckin, you know, him. Kill him. This was probably a bit over the top but I think I'd got the tone just right an nobody laughed at me. At least I managed to stop short a sayin, Kill the pig, like the kids do in that film Lord a the Flies. It's also a book too, but I'm tryin to stop knowin shit like that.
The gang seek financial gain by stealing mobile phones and selling them on. Ironically, they are unintentionally aided by Mr Ashwood, who is intent on introducing the boys to Sanjay, a former student who did well, studied economics at Cambridge and moved on to big things in the City. Sanjay has a major impact, although not quite in the reforming capacity intended by Mr Ashwood.
The language makes Londonstani as difficult to read as it is to quote from. Aside from the profanities, it is also cryptic: words are half-finished and what could be topographical errors are in fact Malkani's attempts at stylistic nods to speech as spoken. There is confusion because these boys are more privileged than it may seem.
As the narrative progresses, Jason becomes increasingly distracted by his ill-fated romance, which serves to soften his approach to life in general. But although there are moments of comedy, Malkani never fully develops either plot or characters. It reads more as a blurred sketch, inconsistently handled as it slides between the sub-literate and the sophisticated. There are two major events, a suicide and Jason's inept robbery of his father's warehouse, neither of which fulfil their dramatic potential.
Despite the bravado, it all dribbles to a close. Perhaps the biggest obstacle facing Londonstani is not Malkani's half-hearted ambition and his reliance on having a strong subject (multiculturalism), nor the messy prose which distracts and deflects, nor even the dialogue and Malkani's irritating attempts at rendering non- grammatical speech, but the fact that too many Asian writers have already written far better, solidly conceived and less self-consciously mannered novels on the same theme.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
• Londonstani By Gautam Malkani Fourth Estate, 343pp. £12.99
