"The Voids" by Ryan O'Connor

An audio book

The narrator's living in a Glasgow high-rise that going to be knocked down. He's one of the few left now that the others are receiving compensation cheques - leaving like sand from a broken hourglass. There's a lift for the even floors and another for the odd - like 2 streets. He breaks into other flats. Each one has a different noise because of the different items left - it's like a juke-box.

He hallucinated as a child. Now he drinks, and has LSD,etc. It's like the Ulysses drunken episode in places. We see Glasgow lowlife - bars, pushers, free papers, prostitution, fortune tellers, etc. There are LSD-fueled moments of significance, days that disappear without trace, flashes of insight about life, flashbacks to childhood - when he was young his father took him on tour around small clubs in Northern England and nearly abandons him on the bus ride back. His mother changed her mind about aborting him when in the clinic waiting room. His father may have been a child molester.

He recalls kissing a girl for the first time. She told him when her parents would be out so that he could come round. He saw her through her window waiting for him in her underwear and was so entranced he became a peeping tom, caught by her father when he returned.

He recalls Jimmy going all around Glasgow, looking for his grave.

My favourite section (maybe I've read it before as a short story?) is when he's on the roof with 80 y.o. widower Pete. He knows Pete will jump. Pete's wife used to watch the planes and dream. They make paper jets and throw them down. They talk about love (Pete's had too much, the narrator not enough).

There are many similes -

• A man sits alone in pub "like a kid sitting alone on a seesaw"
• Someone is "Staring at his empty glass like a father staring at a photo of his missing child".
• In the pub with Mia, with a free juke-box "There was a streetlight directly outside the window behind us, and its grainy orange vapour drifted through the wire mesh and frosted glass like atomised heart-ache"

Light triggers lyricism - "Shafts of muted sunlight cut through the dead air"

At the end of the book he buys a flight - the one that's the same time as the building's demolition. It happens to be heading to Istanbul. While he's on the plane, looking down, he imagines being on the rooftop looking up at the plane, the air between sandwiched. All that light. He misses the moment of the building's destruction.

Good dialogue throughout. The last few chapters dragged a bit, but it was good fun.

Other reviews

• Benjamin Myers (These scenes, perhaps inevitably, most recall the work of modern Scottish forefathers James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, and, in the reimagining of a city, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. The manic edge and perpetually stumbling forward motion of the prose is also reminiscent of literary precursors such as JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. ... readers’ enjoyment will depend on their propensity for being dragged from one bender to the next without so much as a moment’s respite to recharge, refuel or at least swig an ice-cold Irn-Bru. In its restless energy and episodic structure, The Voids certainly reads like a debut novel, and there is something nostalgically 1990s-ish about its unapologetic scenes of wanton hedonism)
• Stuart Kelly (When I am reading I always think “who are the influences behind this?” An obvious one is JG Ballard ... William Burroughs ... Malcolm Lowry. Like Under The Volcano, this book is an epic, booze-fuelled bender, shot through with religious imagery ... The Voids also has the strange mixture of a character who is profoundly delusional and yet remarkably self-aware. ... There are perhaps too many descriptions of variously coloured skies, but given it is a book that flaunts its protagonist’s inherent complexity, such stylistic tics are venal rather than mortal sins.)