Of course I hate Richard Milward. I mean, let's get that out of the way right now. He's young, cool, good-looking and a twice-published novelist with rave reviews. What's not to hate? But give him his due: dude can write.
Apples, Milward's debut novel (first published in 2007) tells the story of two Middlesbrough teenagers, Adam and Eve, and their non-love story. Adam is an OCD geek who has to close the door ten times before leaving the house, gets caught masturbating to his Dad's porno mags and obsesses over Beatles albums (a very teenage thing to do). Eve is a mouthy pretty-girl with a body for sin and a head for getting mortalled whose mum has just been diagnosed with cancer. She has no idea what she wants out of life, but like so many girls her age she thinks she could well end up a super-model.
As is the law for every coming of age novel written since the 50s, Apples has been compared to Catcher In The Rye ("...meets the Arctic Monkeys", said The Times) though personally I found it closer to a British Less Than Zero. There's far more Bret Easton Ellis to Milward's writing than there is Salinger, along with lashings of his hero Irving Welsh (he names Trainspotting as the book that inspired him to write). I enjoyed it, despite the depression and self-loathing I always feel when I discover yet another writer both younger and more talented than I am... but despite how short the book is (only 200 pages) I almost wish it had been shorter still. The scenes told from Adam or Eve's perspectives are gripping, hilarious and heartbreaking. Every now and then, though, Milward goes off on a tangent with chapters written from the perspective of a butterfly, a streetlamp or an unborn foetus. These felt a little too much like creative writing exercises for my tastes, though the foetus did at least make me smile.
Keenly observed, very funny and shamelessly un-pc, Milward captures the voice of contemporary disaffected youth better than anyone I've read in a while. Look away if you're easily offended, because here's the line that convinced me I was going to enjoy this book...
She had that sort of Drew Barrymore look; innocent and pretty, but from the wrong angle you could accuse her of being a mong.
