Childhood games, adult greed

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The opening of Simon Armitage's debut novel immediately signals that this is no first-time writer at work, but a considerable poet. A man is clambering up into an attic where all the leftover bits and pieces of his childhood are stored. It reminds him of the long-ago time that his father slipped off the joists and burst through the ceiling, "as if God in heaven had taken the wrong step, exposing a skinny, white limb to the world below".

Although the attic is an easy symbol of childhood, the language is compelling and precise. Among the junk, he finds crayons like "rounds of ammunition", a commemorative set of decimal coins, the "smell of memory". This could almost be E Nesbitt territory and, indeed, the man - Barney - is searching for a magical creature of infancy, the little green man which he and his friends once used as an idol of comradeship and wickedness.

It's a pungent start, and Armitage doesn't get tangled in his wordsmithery. His narrative is tight and gripping, full of nicely unexpected plot twists and a pulsing sense of impending calamity. Barney is trying to recapture his childhood. Thirtysomething, separated, and disappointed with life, he rediscovers the little green man in his loft and finds out that it is actually a genuine Chinese antique, worth serious money. Rather than cashing in, though, Barney decides to bring his long-lost mates together again to play the old dares, with the important distinction that this time the prize is real and the adults will sacrifice all loyalties for it.

There's a nightmare sense of childhood imaginings spinning into a dull, adult world, as Barney, Pompus, Winkie, Tony Football and Stubbs make each other eat shit, cop off with the ugliest woman in town and expose their guiltiest secrets - all for possession of a small jade statue with several zeros on the end of its price-tag. But Armitage handles the grotesque elements in his story with a delicate feeling for the meanness of children, and a caustic handling of adult greed. Exactly how many zeros does it take to betray the loyalties of your past?

Little Green Man is a finely-sculpted and readable first novel. But, strangely for a poet who has brought a distinctive Yorkshire voice to contemporary British poetry, Armitage's characters never step out from behind their nicknames. We learn little more about them than that "Winkie" has a small penis, Tony Football is gay, and Pompus was named after the uncle who was actually his father.

When Barney takes the train to London to get the little green man valued, his attempt at self-assertion is a redundant grim-up-north banality which could apply equally, in reverse, to a Londoner: "200 miles is 200 miles, and 30 quid is 30 quid where I come from, and anyway I was just an ordinary bloke with an honest inquiry."

Woodenness and diffidence of characterisation is a plague in the modern English novel. It's tempting to suggest that this is because there's a narrowness in the range and depth of voice in England itself. Except that Armitage's poetry proves that notion absurd.

In his witty, moving and intensely wrought Selected Poems, Armitage's voice is thick with passion. It's a muscular voice that can roam confidently round world news in the poem Killing Time, or simply come back home where, in an early piece, the poet declares he has not bummed across America, but lived with thieves in Manchester; hasn't padded barefoot through the Taj Mahal, but has "held the wobbly head of a boy/ at the day centre, and stroked his fat hands".

It is not England, but something to do with the form of the novel that makes it hard for even so gifted a writer as Armitage to clean out the attic junk and allow adult English characters to speak convincingly in fiction.

lAlexander Linklater is deputy editor of Prospect magazine.