Shaun Wilson’s latest novel gets going with a childhood recalled like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it is one marred by violence. Oh here we go again, I thought, as the young Shaun is thumped repeatedly by his enraged father Malc. Every novel I review these days seems to be about a working-class lad with a violent father from, say, north of Birmingham. I braced myself and thought of the immortal Bacon parents in the comic magazine Viz whose main purpose in life is to thrash their young son half to death in every issue. (Auberon Waugh, late of this parish, once said that it was impossible fully to understand Britain without reading Viz, and he was right.) The Bacons came to mind because we are in the north, mostly in Wigton, and although it’s on the other side of the Pennines to County Durham, which I am more used to, the dialect is very similar.

Malc’s Boy announces its big idea on page one, before the reminiscing starts, as Shaun proposes to write a book about himself and his father on ‘themes of masculinity, subversion and power’, which sounds like pain but thank goodness turns out not to be. We hark back to Malc’s childhood and the beginning of his love of violence and its importance to him. Then we cut to the present, and Shaun and Malc are sitting together companionably while the son interviews the father about the book he is writing – which will be the book under review.

The dialogue, written as if for a play, begins with Shaun proposing a format. ‘A reckon we can mek the actual writin uh the book part uh the book itself.’ How very meta, as they say. His father replies: ‘A couldn’t give a shite aboot any uh that side on it.’ One sympathises with Malc to an extent; but, myself, I found the book rather well done. It skips back and forth between past and present like this; the chapters are short, the writing is tight and it all zips along quite nicely.

I can’t pretend there’s anything resembling a plot, but naturally this also gets addressed. Shaun, always referred to until adulthood as ‘the boy’ in chapters dealing with the past, grows up, and we watch him doing so from about the age of eight. The batterings he’s dealt are quite distressing, and I wondered how on earth father and son are getting on these days. But there’s often a nice turn of phrase. Drops of blood after a headbutt on the floor of a pub are ‘like art’; someone is described as having ‘a weaselly fucken face, ye wouldn’t trust that cunt wid a warm loaf’; and after a large meal, there’s the feeling of being ‘as full as a monk’s nuts’.

‘A’s tellin ye noo,’ says Malc at the beginning, ‘folk in Wigton won’t buy a book like that. Folk wanna good story. Plenny uh action.’ Well, I liked it, but then I’m not from Wigton.