Death and verse in Coatbridge

SINCE 2011, Brian Conaghan has been pursuing a successful career as the author of “young adult” novels centred on the concerns of working-class teenagers, winning the Costa Children’s Book Award and being nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Treacle Town, aimed at readers aged 14 and over, is an uncompromising novel with plenty of adult language, set in the aftermath of an 18-year-old boy’s murder. It’s also the first novel Conaghan has set in his hometown of Coatbridge, and the sense of personal investment in the book is almost palpable.

Stuck in an environment of deprivation and unemployment, sectarianism and gang culture, Connor and his friends spend their days drinking, getting stoned, playing computer games and listening to rap. Everyone thinks they’re just a bunch of neds, but Connor believes there could be more to him than that, if only the cards weren’t stacked against him.

He lives with his widowed dad, a bouncer and bodybuilder obsessed with his training regime, who has been harsh and unapproachable since the death of his wife. Of Connor’s closest friends, only a girl nicknamed Nails, with her black belt in taekwondo, seems to have any chance of escaping their bleak surroundings.

Trig, habitually dressed “in a grey Kenzo trackie and Burberry hat” is a guy with a violent streak, who Connor knows would throw his friends under a bus if the need arose.

When their pal Biscuit is jumped in a park and murdered by a rival crew, the cracks between them begin to open up. Seeing videos celebrating Biscuit’s death on social media, their first impulse is to take violent revenge, though this is defused temporarily by the idea of getting Connor, who’s best at English, to make a diss video as a retort.

Looking online for inspiration, Connor discovers the slam poetry scene. It’s not rap, but it’s the kind of thing he thinks he might be good at – perhaps the thing that will enable him to break out of his hopeless existence. Seeing that there’s a slam poetry group that meets in Glasgow, he wrestles with the idea of giving it a go, but agonises over whether or not it’s for the likes of him, convinced that he’ll be judged for his clothes and his accent.

By this point, Connor is already feeling that he wants to slough off the hoodie stereotype he embodies. But the pressure to conform exerts a huge gravitational pull. He keeps his growing interest in poetry a secret, knowing exactly what the macho culture around him would think of it. The threat of violence is a constant undercurrent, and Conaghan really communicates the vigilance that someone in Connor’s position has to keep up at all times. It’s so deeply embedded that when Connor’s desire to break the cycle of violence clashes with Trig’s demands for brutal reprisal against Biscuit’s killers, not only does his safety hang in the balance but his very identity.

Scattered with some wry lines (Connor’s diet-obsessed dad “shoulders past me and heads for the kitchen to cook up a very bland storm”) and built on strong characterisation, Treacle Town is a powerful depiction of dead-end lives, along with its protagonist’s conflicting desires to escape while feeling he would be betraying his roots by doing so. Convinced his authenticity, his “struggle and grit”, will give him an edge on the poetry scene, he’s driven to condemn the harsh, deprived, hopeless environment he came from while knowing that on some level he has an obligation to celebrate it too. Probably much what Conaghan must have been thinking as he wrote it.