Travels through taboos

Niall Griffiths likes to push his characters to harsh extremes. His first two novels, Grits and Sheepshagger, were every bit as gnarly in subject matter and style as their titles suggested. Both followed the rough fortunes of a disaffected, dissolute crowd of drifters washed up in Aberystwyth, in rugged, expletive-ridden vernacular prose. Both were uncompromising accounts of lives revolving eternally around drugs and the dole. Griffiths was immediately pegged - irresistibly, if inaccurately - as "the Welsh Irvine Welsh". Another common reference point (perhaps more flatteringly) was James Kelman. Apart from the drugs and dialect, those two books also sculpted a unique vision of the Welsh landscape. Wales, however, hardly figures in his latest novel, Kelly and Victor. There's a brief sequence where three of the main characters drive to Aberystwyth for a "comedown" one-night trip to recover from the aftermath of the hedonistic millennium celebrations which open the story. Otherwise, the countryside couldn't seem further away. Most of the action here is set in and around Liverpool, in a seemingly never-ending-series of raucous, smoke-filled pubs and clubs. In its own twisted, tainted way, Kelly and Victor is at heart a love story.

The star-crossed pair of the title meet in the opening pages at a club, both of them "three days inter the new millennium", and still partying. Kelly wastes little time in taking Victor back to her flat, and, with her hand around his throat, they have sex. It's the best he has ever had. Griffiths charts the dark trajectory of their relationship over several weeks, as things in the bedroom get increasingly intense and sadomasochistic.

Victor's initial joy turns sour when, in one particularly nasty scene, Kelly's unchecked appetite for sexual violence, and her urges to "punish, hurt, damage, scare" him, go much too far.

Perhaps Griffiths does, too, in taking us there. As Kelly muses, there are "infinite ways in which people want more, some of them sick an dirty an all-consuming". The way her own actions are described in prolonged, graphic detail, makes for very uncomfortable reading. Throughout the story, invisible lines between what is personally acceptable or taboo are crossed over and over again, with extreme authorial skill. The effect is genuinely shocking. All the same, Griffiths's habit of continually rubbing his readers' faces in the dirt veers towards self-parody when it's overdone. You do wonder how many people will finish this book.

What keeps you reading is the sheer force of the narrative voices. The story is divided into two interior monologues, describing the same sequence of events - an initially "pure" love and its descent into brutality - first told by Victor, then by Kelly. We are taken inside their heads, through their chemical and sexual highs and lows, in a scouring vernacular prose that warps written English into a whole host of ferocious shapes. As with the grimly authentic portrait of life in contemporary urban Britain that emerges, it's hardly pretty. But there's little doubt that it does succeed in leaving an indelible mark that is all its own.