‘The post-mortem of Susan Jessica Hand who was going on thirteen years old showed the presence in her vagina of semen, saliva bearing the trace of alcoholic spirit, and sheep’s faeces.’ Working from the McEwan paradigm that established the short story as something nasty and brutal these opening lines describe a fairly typical event in the world of Meades’s fiction. In the seven stories collected in Filthy English we have incest, buggery and murder in Agadir, a dog who stars in pornographic films, atavistic atrocities from a crazed lexicographer. Etc.

All of this emerges from a tangle of twisted diction and quirky vernacular – a twenty-page story employs half a dozen different narrators – so that Meades’s stories read like cuts from a faulty dictaphone sutured roughly together. His best voice is the roller and avo (Rolls Royce and avocado) argot of the criminal wide boy made good – like R R who ‘made more bread than Hovis’; or Len whose idea of an active role in business was to suggest to a chip-shop owner that he might like to vacate the premises by throwing the shop’s cat into the deep-fryer’; or Alec who, as a POW, offered odds on the possibilities of an escape attempt succeeding.

The other favoured voice is that of the vicious scholar, the pedantic nutter who packs the text with footnote-asides and parenthetical clutter (cf Nabokov, Despair, 1934). But there’s none of the lyricism of Nabokov; Meades’s gentlest touches are also the bleakest: ‘The sea is the colour of marine camouflage, of cigarette ash, of those gulls that make coathangers in the sky’. A page of his writing hurts the eye the way gravel hurts bare feet. A whole story gives you a headache.

The actual horrors of the stories are less striking; somehow real life always manages to be nastier. While I was reading Filthy English the man the media have Meadishly named ‘The Fox’ was assaulting whole families in Bedfordshire and a gunman killed twenty people in a Macdonalds takeaway.

The authentic horror of advanced societies is waste, or at least that is the keynote of James Buchan’s impressive first novel. What appears from the cover to be a Book Club reprint of a novel by Buchan’s grandfather, and from the opening paragraphs to be a piece of SF (‘It was that hot summer of 198–, the summer of the war’) turns out to be an ambitiously contemporary fiction

Back from the Lebanon to write his book on the Palestinians, Adam Murray has returned to upper-class London. From their SW3 flat Adam and his flatmates Mary, Laura and Toby make the rounds of parties, weekends in the country, race meetings, and heroin. Activity masks the real atrophy and when Beirut is besieged Adam leaves for the Lebanon again, ostensibly to look for a lost friend and write articles for the Telegraph; less explicitly, to immerse himself in the destructive element.

For the first half of the novel Buchan masters his material as effortlessly as Adam, gliding from county to county and from party to party. The second half of the book – set in Beirut – is more exciting, more ambitious and more difficult. ‘Pales-tine is a state of mind’, Adam is told on more than one occasion as car bombs erupt around him; but so is Eton. His responses are crucially defined and limited by language (these car bombs do take it out of one’). In the Lebanon he finds what he expected to find, ‘the skin of civilisation peeled away’, but that glimpse into the heart of darkness, as Laura calls it, still leaves him faltering at the question of the nurse he falls in love with in Beirut. ‘How much would it cost for me to live one year at Oxford, including food?’ she asks. ‘Oh Kate, what a question’, is all that Adam can manage in reply. There is more at stake than a failure of empathy.

The failure, it should be stressed, is Adam’s and not his creator’s. Buchan has a knack for conjuring character with a few deft lines and brief snatches of dialogue. Some of the more minor characters are done with extraordinary skill. There is Ambrose, an ageing Arabist who arrives in the novel with the line ‘I have already quietly dined. I ate a light lunch in what I believe is called a layby’; or Toby who works in the food hall of Harrods and comes home every night with his trousers stuffed with expensive delicacies.

Buchan’s style is oblique and elliptical; he prefers the quiet detail to the huge revelation. In a scene near the end of the novel Adam’s experiences are adroitly telescoped when he visits a ruined house which turns out, on closer inspection to be not ruined, ‘merely started and never finished.’ It’s an understated but very effective moment.

A Trick of the Light is also about a return to London. In this case the hero is George Grillet, a young Catholic tormented by memories of a failed love affair and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He rents a room in the flat of Susan, a left-wing journalists, and is happiest when wandering the streets of London or when he is immersed in the pages of a thriller. His chance for real life adventure comes when a contact of Susan’s persuades him to steal an important cassette from the offices of a fascist organisation on The Isle of Dogs. Before he has a chance to find out what is on the tape, George finds himself in the violent grip of the IRA, an organisation which is rapidly becoming the deus ex machina of ‘quality’ fiction as the KGB is for the station bookstall blockbusters that George so enjoys.

Sebastian Faulks’s first novel is most successful as a thriller. The scenes describing the night-time break-in are Macleanishly absorbing but for the rest of the time George is just too dull, simple or naive to be much cared about – even if we are urged to see The Outsider as a parallel text. George reads the Camus novel and finds himself identifying with Meursault whose values, like his own, have got mixed up’. George is the only person in the book who is mixed up; the rest of them have the clarity of purpose which only the two-dimensional can achieve. The withdrawn headmaster of the language school where George gets some work turns out, surprise, surprise, to be a homosexual. That he is an old-fashioned ‘queer’ kind of homosexual is to be expected given Faulks’s remarks on foreigners, perverts and homosexuals in a recent review of some books by Molly Keane. Worst of all is Susan, a cypher-thin piece of hackneyed Leftspeak. For her, Meursault is ‘just a force to show-up the unreality of bourgeois ethics’ and in an interior monologue we hear that she ‘didn’t believe in people crying, or at least she didn’t believe in women crying … it was hard enough to be conforming to some wretched male stereotype’. Later she even says she wants to ‘fuck’ George (why, I can’t imagine) and when her advances are rejected she sees him as ‘trying to act out some kind of macho humiliation fantasy’.

If Faulks’s point is that there are left wingers/feminists who are caricatures of themselves then it’s a weak one, since the target he has constructed lacks even the substance necessary to bear the weight of parody. What we are left with is not a parody of Leftspeak but a parody of the way Leftspeak is received. There is a cliché of response, in other words, as well as a cliché of expression. To that extent there is a common failing in writer and protagonist that mars the whole undertaking.