Fiction:Abbie is nearly 40 and wants a baby. Felix, her social worker husband, is under pressure to produce the white stuff of this book's title.
Their neighbours, Jed and Maxine, with their twin daughters, are the regular, settled, bickering family unit Felix and Abbie aspire to be - Jed, symbolically, even has a job setting off fireworks. At Felix's work, white stuff is found on the underwear of a young girl, Ruby, to whose case he has been assigned. Ruby's brothers work with white stuff too, putting down the lines on the middle of roads. And then there is the sinister, chalky teacher at her school.
In Simon Armitage's second novel, there is a compression and neat symbolism suitable to a writer known mainly for his poetry. Even the golfballs Felix and his middle-aged neighbours fire off into the distance at the driving range are used as a metaphor:
Short and long, high and low, wonky and straight, glorious or utterly crap, men disseminate their stock of tiny white missiles into the night, each one a symbol of their worth, a particle of their essence and an object of hope.
Along with the biological clock strand of the story is a parallel tale of parenthood - that of Abbie's own adoption. Having decided to search for her real mother, Abbie, implausibly, puts her case in the hands of her husband. With at least three themes now on the go - Abbie's quest for motherhood, Abbie's quest for her mother, and Felix's quest for clues to Ruby's problems - Armitage gives himself yet more scope for neatness, this time in terms of plot. At times the domestic saga shows a desire to move genres and transform itself into a thriller, in keeping with Felix's taste for detective work and social work procedure. But the tie-ups, coincidences and sudden climactic episodes of violence jar with the determinedly plain tone of the domestic background.
The novel's main problem, in fact, is the dullness of the central characters. For people approaching 40, with a complex and demanding environment to deal with, none of them seems to have much inner life. Felix and Jed default to standard blokeish camaraderie at every opportunity, while Abbie and Maxine are annoying clichés, easily reduced to needy tears or shrill complaint. So apparently predictable are these people in their nameless provincial English town that any behaviour that strays into the vaguely unorthodox seems entirely unbelievable. Armitage is determined to have his dramatic setpieces and wrap things up tidily, but his cast is too bland to carry the plot along.
And yet, at random moments, as if breaking free from the book's plan, there are stranger and more interesting cameos, such as the sudden fatal bullfight which takes place beneath Felix's office window, or the false adoption trail leading to a dog who has a set of wheels instead of front legs. Freed from the restrictions of the form Armitage has chosen, and allowed to exist as poems or stories, perhaps this territory would have been more fertile ground.
The White Stuff By Simon Armitage Penguin Viking, 249pp. £12.99
Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist