Paranoia you can't put down

BOOK review

UNDER CONTROL

Mark McNay

Canongate, £10.99

NOT for the faint of heart, Under Control features people in and out of control in all the wrong places. Sex, drugs and faeces feature heavily. But then, Mark McNay is the man who managed to put folk off chicken with his debut novel, Fresh, set in a poultry factory in Glasgow.

In this, the difficult second novel, he transports his vital ingredients to Norwich: grit, rage and despair, a dash of Irvine Welsh, and, as in Fresh, a short, sharp timeframe.

Gary has narcissistic personality disorder and paranoia, and his world is ruled by Galileo, a forceful and violent manifestation of his own mind's "fear of nothingness". Galileo tells Gary how to fight against the machine, as represented by Nigel the 'guardian angel' social worker. Charlie is a prostitute, heroin addict and Gary's sexy girlfriend. In a book which segues between several jittery narratives, it's apt that Gary's is the voice we hear in the first person. And what a narrative. Intelligent, vain, suspicious, paying lip service yet violently loathing those around him, it is stifling, disorienting and vertiginous to be inside a mind such as this. Murderous urges, obscene sexual fantasies and manic arguments are all played out and we have a ringside ticket.

It's downbeat, gritty and lacklustre; cups of tea are imbibed, a flaccid ready meal pings in the microwave, a text is sent, a reply received. McNay's attentions to the sensory fabric of the everyday are boring yet powerful, because they illuminate the bewildering hyper-realness of it all.

Complementary to this are the insidious prompts to consider the nature of appearance and reality. Gary, Charlie and Nigel are multi-faceted, difficult people who have emotional shifts; we might pity, loathe and champion them all on the same page. No one is as they seem, and control doesn't always rest with the obvious candidate.

Perhaps McNay's forte is in creating a book so unmannered, visceral and emotionally manipulative that you want to make it go away and not let it out of your hand simultaneously. Which takes quite something.