Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, by Kerry Hudson – review

Both the beginning of Kerry Hudson's semi-autobiographical debut and the life of Janie Ryan are announced by an opening line of which the only words that are repeatable here are "Get out!".

Exuberantly foul-mouthed in style, Tony Hogan is part coming-of-age novel, part deadbeat picaresque. All-too quickly Janie's life becomes a series of moonlight flits from women's refuges to downmarket B&Bs, from spells in care to council flats shared with a series of "uncles" who are feckless at best and fascist at worst. Chief among them is Tony Hogan, a swastika-bearing druglord with a "complexion the colour of Spam", whose presence spreads over Janie's life like "a furry mould growing over a sweaty slab of cheese".

Raised on a diet of margarine sandwiches and tense negotiations with the "social", Janie slowly learns the laws of the urban jungle: pragmatically adopting and shrugging off sectarian allegiances and religious convictions with each new neighbourhood. But between Blu-Tacked shoes, Fray Bentos pies and her mother's week-long "sleeps", Janie begins to discover the illicit pleasures of libraries, and through them the possibility of having a story that is different from her mother's and grandmother's before her.

It would be easy for Hudson to slip into the well-worn groove of the misery memoir made good, and there are points at which Tony Hogan threatens to lapse into cliche. However, Janie's irrepressible, childish glee and the sly humour into which it evolves give the novel a wry self-awareness that is both refreshing and endearing.

One senses a broader purpose at work, too: the Ryan women are nothing if not fighters, and the "Ryan Temper" speaks of their frustration at the hand that life has dealt them. In this sense, Hudson's debut, as undespairing as it is unflinching, manages to be both a personal statement of intent and also a painfully funny, humane commentary on a welfare system that blunts the blade of grinding poverty but fails to address the numbing poverty of aspiration which overwhelms so many of Janie's contemporaries.