At the beginning of Ned Beauman's third novel, Glow, one worries it might all become a bit overwhelming. There are a lot of similes, perhaps a record number. It's May 2010 and our hero Raf is at a rave in Peckham about to try a new drug called glow for the first time. The powder is wrapped up in cigarette paper like a pork wonton; Raf spies a woman whose cheekbones are like a 1980s computer graphic; he thinks about speaking to her but the room is packed "like a rush-hour Tube carriage that's learned to vibrate to a determinate rhythm". And that's just the first paragraph. It seems an unsustainable density.
Individually, these descriptions are often wonderfully evocative. On Beauman's watch, unlovely south London will never again be so romantic: "In the gutter there are diamonds of safety glass," he notes of a smashed windscreen, "with which this morning's rain has mingled an alluvium of damp white blossom and a few fronds of synthetic wig hair caught on a chicken bone, like the shattered remains of a tribal fetish." Collectively, however, they slow the pace; they become more exciting for the author than the reader.
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