Cocaine for Prince Hal

The future Henry V is a trust-fund brat with trauma issues, in a listless debut novel that rewrites Shakespeare with a young cast

336pp, Jonathan Cape, T £14.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£16.99, ebook £8.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

I turned 30 a few months ago, but Henry Henry made me feel old. Not just old, but clapped-out, knackered, weary to my bones. The debut novel of Allen Bratton, a young American short-story writer, it’s a modern retelling of the “Henriad”, hyperactive in its iconoclasm and gleeful in its caustic embellishment of Shakespeare’s source material. It features

Hal being fellated by Falstaff and using a sex toy on Henry Percy. You will pine for the wobbly 1980s BBC adaptations.

Bratton’s novel picks up in the mid-2010s with a rich, dissolute Hal drifting through London, his days fogged by alcohol, cigarettes and all-consuming cocaine benders. His ghoulish father haunts a draughty Belgravia mansion. His most dependable companion is Falstaff, a raddled roué who picks up boys in his Fulham local. And Hal’s on-off boyfriend is Henry Percy, a “gap yah” do-gooder with decent teeth, strong arms and a self-flagellating degree in development studies.

The early chapters are quite fun.

Bratton has a sharp eye for the absurdities of the white-saviour expublic-schoolboy. And there’s a keen sense of the aching fugue of one’s early 20s – a smog of fraying purpose and directionless ambition, clammy with the realisation that adult life may have been exhausted before it has truly begun.

Even here, though, Bretton’s novel begins to grind uncomfortably against Shakespeare’s plays. The stakes are unavoidably lower. The drama for this Hal comes when his debit cards are blocked, so he can’t pay his drug dealer. Shakespeare’s hero, you’ll recall, had to face off against the massed armies of France and rebellion among the

Welsh. As for the historic background, in Henry Henry, Hal’s father has merely disinherited his uncle Richard – rather than imprisoning him and starving him to death. The antics of a spendthrift trustafarian just don’t cut the same dash as the rumbling majesty of Shakespeare’s work.

But the book’s greatest issue is an invention of Bratton’s. In a grand reveal, it becomes clear that Hal’s father has been sexually abusing his son. The first time this abuse is described, it scalds. But as the novel progresses, Bratton runs out of road. After all, abusive incest is about as far as its possible to push a fictional father-son relationship (and stretches the historical reality far beyond breaking point). More unfortunate still, inadvertent or not, is the suggestion that Hal’s homosexuality is partly born of this warped sexual awakening.

When Bratton allows his writing to breathe, you glimpse a fresher, more expansive novel. The gentle treatment of the death of Richard II, for instance, late in the story, seems to come from a different, less claustrophobic book. Like its protagonist, Henry Henry is furious with bottled energy. Yet without Shakespeare’s grand canvas – and marred by Bratton’s intrusive, insistent impishness – it fizzles out, a squib in damp grass.

Once more unto the breach: Laurence Olivier as Henry V, 1944