BOOK REVIEW / Adrift with a vocal hero: Touch and go by Sam McAughtry, Blackstaff pounds 6.95

BELFAST in 1946 is no place for returning heroes. Flight Lieutenant Hugh Reilly, prematurely demobbed to see his dying mother, finds that ex-servicemen are routinely humiliated in the dole queue. Jobs and justice are in the gift of corrupt councillors. The sectarian stewpot simmers with barely contained violence. Soon Reilly is expelled from the home to which he has only just returned.

Adrift, he lurches from bar to bed among a cast of boozers and losers. Slim hope resides in Mary Waugh, the whore who takes him in, and Jack O'Hare, a politician on the make who finds Reilly's writing talent useful. Dicky the dosser and a pair of down-at-heel, unfrocked professionals batten on to Reilly, sensing strength and good fortune to come. Hovering like a vulture across the water and above the narrative is Albert Pierrepoint, the public hangman who, like everyone in Belfast, is looking for work.

Sam McAughtry wastes few words on the landscape of Belfast. Poverty and blight are implicit in the locations, the buses, bars, clubs and flop-houses in which life is transacted. Greyest of all is the 'buroo': the dole office. It is possibly the largest in Europe, and has a chest-high counter to protect its clerks from assault.

The sheer hopelessness of a society riven with drink and bigotry should make this a depressing novel, not least because the reader knows that little has improved since. But the characters are not given to self-pity. And apart from Reilly's rift with his brother, friendship and family ties hold firm, lending an upbeat energy to the story. There is even some justice: Mary Waugh, whose origins were poorer than the poor, has had a good war servicing American officers, and now has a nice little house with a bathroom.

There is comedy, too, in a couple of scenes when Reilly takes on petty bureaucracy. And the plot challenges conventional prejudice: it is family loyalty that gets Reilly into trouble, and sectarian corruption that gets him out of it. What price justice when you have an appointment with Albert Pierrepont?

McAughtry's prose is not elegant. He writes in the vernacular appropriate to a first-person narrative, mostly avoiding the more obscure local idioms but retaining a native energy and articulacy. The dialogue can be a little uneven and stilted, but there are some memorable images: when a pretentious accent falters under stress, 'the vowels were being flattened like potato farls under a rolling pin'.