High among Oliver’s lists of to-do are achieving penetrative sex with Jordana, and attempting to heal the perceived rift in the marriage of his progressive parents, those of the type given to “improving” holidays. Here is a lad who likes to see things through. With the pansexual physio, Tate books an appointment and puts the accusation to him. A local physiotherapist is classed as a “pansexual” (attracted to everything), a local Muslim family re-categorised as far more exotic Zoroastrians, both on equally flimsy evidence. )Īt times, the cold analysis hot-wires with the fever of his rampant imagination and the classification goes awry. Fixated on minor detail (observing during kisses that his girlfriend Jordana has been drinking semi-skimmed milk) Tate is also given to rather outre’ similes of the mind (bottles in a bottle-bank for instance are likened to the piled corpses of Holocaust victims. Minute details of his neighbours and school mates appearance and lives are mulled over with clinical detail. New words are memorised on a daily basis (forming the book’s chapter headings, including autarky, decollation, fastigium and quidnunc ), people are slotted into different categories like so many enzymes in a petri-dish. Oliver sees life as a series of black-and-white logic puzzles which can be solved as soon as the correct equations come to hand. Does it succeed?ġ5 year old Swansea boy Oliver Tate is clever, obsessive, solipsistically single-minded and doggedly literal in his grappling with the world. Submarine, the first novel of Swansea born poet Joe Dunthorne, first released in 2008 and now making its way into paperback aims to capture both these aspects. Catcher in the Rye can be regarded as the apotheosis of the first outlook, the Adrian Mole series the standard-bearer of the second. Those writers in this genre emphasising the former fact aim for the profound and lyrical, the majority home in on the latter and aim for comedy. At the same time, the self-righteous certainty and ignorance endemic to adolescence can clash against this purity with a jarring clang. A teenage narrator has the potential to reflect the world in a purer and starker state. The “coming-of-age” teenage novel is now a well-weathered archetype, every bit as established in the literary pantheon as the state of the nation diorama, or the star-crossed romantic tragedy.

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne