Man in the middle of trouble

Dexter Bucknell is down on his luck: 41 years old, divorced and downwardly mobile, having given up a successful career in publishing to go freelance as a copy-editor and look after his two boys in Bethnal Green.

He has a pain-in-the-neck ex-wife, debts, duties and disappointments to cope with, and during the week in his life which the novel charts, we see him trying to restore some of his losses; soliciting for freelance work, haggling terms for his overdraft, placating his tetchy widowed mother and trying to persuade his girlfriend Moy to marry him. Like the green man on the fire exit signs which intrigue him, he is always "running to escape the flame-shapes leaping behind him".

Dexter is no romantic hero, although the women around him seem to think he could be. He bumbles from day to day, never quite in control of what he's doing, often too tired or preoccupied to get it right.

Tragically, he doesn't see quite how washed-up he is becoming, or how precariously poised he is in his girlfriend's affections. Georgina Hammick is brilliant at the dynamics of this relationship, showing how situations sour through no one's fault in particular. The evening on which Dexter half-heartedly proposes is not at all like a scene from a novel, but horribly realistic, with one character too bushed to respond sensitively and the other hopelessly over-invested in a positive outcome. And by adding what they almost say to each other as well as what they do say, Hammick creates a painfully all-round view of a bad time had by all.

Hammick's focus is on the partiality - in every sense - of the account of ourselves we present at any given moment. In the book's prologue, the 10-year-old Dexter is shown repeatedly and unconvincingly denying responsibility for a road accident outside his father's farm which ruined a young man's life. The incident remains a powerfully unspoken presence throughout the rest of the story, bubbling to the surface in certain words and gestures to remind us of all that Dexter doesn't tell anybody, even himself. There isn't really a plot, although it may take the reader some time to realise this.

Hammick has an ambitious agenda hidden behind her downbeat subject and unshowy style, to tell it like it is, even (especially) the shapeless and boring bits. There's an extraordinary conversation between Dexter and Moy which is conducted almost in real time and which wanders around just like real conversation. This takes nerve and much more imaginative power than most novelists can dream of. But Hammick is not a quick or slick producer of fiction, and Green Man Running confirms that her books are really worth waiting for. Beautifully written, concentrated and controlled, it's a treat for all intelligent readers.