Wild Abandon by Joe Dunthorne - review

Wild Abandon

Imagine The Good Life writ large, transplanted from Tom and Margo's priggish Surbiton to rural Wales, and with the enemy grown to embrace the homogenising grind of capitalism and the "piss-drinking drudge of city life". This is the setting for Joe Dunthorne's slick follow-up to his wildly successful debut novel, Submarine.

Dunthorne's fictional community, Blaen-y-llyn, is headed by Don, a paunchy ideologue with a "thick castaway's beard" and a passion for low-tech, cultish invention. His child-protecting Ad-guard, for example, rather charmingly deconstructs into a rail-mounted square of shower curtain that flips down over the TV screen to make images appear misty. Even better are the headphones and mike that comprise Don's Personal Instrument, a teaching tool deployed in a barmy parody of a teenage rite of passage.

Don's long-suffering wife, Freya, pinned to heroic status by Don's self-serving praise, has had enough, although it's not clear what she wants, while the pot-addled, ex-landlord Patrick is drowning in his own lack of ambition and unrequited love for a fellow communard.

When we encounter the ensemble cast of Wild Abandon, the community experiment is in crisis: membership is dwindling and Don's marriage, ever the barometer of Blaen-y-llyn's health, is on the rocks. The only thing propping up the rambling farmhouse and grounds, enlivened by permaculture gardens, wind turbines, polytunnels, a geodesic dome and elaborate mud hut, is the income generated by Janet's "proto-gothic recycled jewellery" business, regularly featured in Elle.

As he did in Submarine, Dunthorne deploys a talent for getting inside the heads of children to cast light on the failings of the adults around them.

Don's daughter Kate, at 17, is desperate to escape into the arms of boyfriend Geraint and the predictable banalities of his suburban life, with its BBQs, four-by-fours and fluffy bathrobes. She regards the rampant drug-taking of her fellow communards as something old people do, "the way most teenagers think about opera", and struggles to remain pristine in the face of hippie laissez-faire by using "contraband" shampoo - as if sharing were itself a kind of contamination.

But the book's star turn is 11-year-old Albert, at once precocious and vulnerable, with a smooth telephone manner (he fields calls from "the outside" with ferocious wit) and an immutable conviction that the world is about to end.

He's right, of course. Except it is the world of Blaen-y-llyn that's teetering on the verge of its own apocalypse, crumbling from within as the forceful proclamations that once sustained it (Don's "new structures for living") dim to a whimper. In a final bid to rejuvenate the community, Don plans a huge rave, complete with industrial-scale amps and a live music tent. It is a scheme of such exquisite self-deception that Dunthorne has you wincing on Don's behalf, page after page-turning page.

Given that an apocalyptic book needs a climatic ending, Dunthorne does himself proud. But he is at his most linguistically agile working on the smaller canvas of domesticity, drawing characters with real staying power: people who dither at life's crossroads, hurt those they love and dig holes for themselves from which they cannot climb out. Fans of Submarine will not be disappointed.