Rose Boyt's third novel relays the lives of the infamous Thomas family, one of the poorest in Hackney, comprised largely of individuals too numbed or exhausted by life to afford morals. Boyt's use of detail is excellent, lending pathos to even unlikable characters: a wife unfaithful to her abusive husband notices with sudden pity that he is "trying to come it like Clint Eastwood". However, because the dialect/stream-of-consciousness narrative style stretches from Dubliners and The Waste Land to Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, these otherwise evocative voices can feel familiar rather than original. The depravity is so relentless (a junkie discovers her real parentage and offers to fellate the hospital guard who finds her taking stolen drugs; a grandmother throws change from the back of an ambulance bearing her dying husband to hospital to her addict son and granddaughter) it occasionally veers close to farce.
The possibility of redemption is held out, but the promise feels overwhelmed – as the reader may too at this point – by the weight of trauma and failed recoveries that precede it.
