Novel of the week Cal Revely-Calder

EXCITING TIMES

by Naoise Dolan

288PP, W&N, £14.99, EBOOK £7.99, AUDIO AVAILABLE

In Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan’s debut novel, the characters have better problems than most of us do. Welcome to Hong Kong, where Julian (English) is a banker and Ava (Irish) is a leech. She, a TEFL teacher, infiltrates his apartment, by conversation as much as sex, and lives in his second bedroom, the better to satirise his world.

Ava’s perch on Julian’s arm is her ticket to Hong Kong glitz. Mostly, they go to parties, where she smiles and drinks; this buys Dolan time to be cruel. “I wondered if Victoria was a real person or three Mitford sisters in a long coat.”

The Brits have it coming, a typical Irish sentiment. But Ava knows she’s vicious – that knowledge amounts to her character – and her best cuts are also sincere: “Victoria was good at wearing clothes.”

The novel drifts along. Dolan either turns on people, or turns them on each other. And then, enter Edith, a solicitor who’s the definition of “couth”. She has “enthusiasm” for theatres and coffee, which Ava likes, and soon there’s sex as well (We’re supposed to like her too).

What matters is colonial status, by which everyone ends up gauged. Edith is a Hong Kong local who studied at Cambridge, and shows an interest in Ava’s socialist bent. Julian, poor white boy, has parents called Florence and Miles, because he grew up in Cambridgeshire.

Dolan’s milieu is Sally Rooney’s – young artistic types who have feelings, and belong in Dublin, wherever they are – but these aren’t normal people, more strawmen for the pyre.

It makes for super pith (“Men were rarely true voyeurs. They wanted you to know they were there”), but adds up to a hail of parting shots, from which Dolan never fails to score. Edith is too good for this novel: she has depth of feeling, and knows that Gucci is “tourist bait”. Still, comedy thrives on the outré.

There’s something to dislike in every scene, but Exciting Times is constant, breezy fun.