The Isle of Dogs ticks all the boxes for a British debut novel: short, dark, intelligent, shot through with irony and obsessed with sex. Daniel Davies takes as his subject the practice of dogging, that peculiarly British idea of gathering in car-parks and picnic sites to engage in group sex and voyeurism; and he also addresses our current surveillance society, where CCTV observes our every move.

Jeremy Shepherd is an intelligent, educated man who gave up his career, abandoned his life and moved back to live with his parents in a small, nameless British provincial town; now he works in a dead-end Civil Service job to fill his days – and spends his evenings having illicit sex with strange couples and other contacts he has made on the dogging scene, all of which is facilitated by the Internet, haven of anonymity. It’s clear that the modern rat race was something that Shepherd ultimately found empty and unfulfilling; in the dogging scene he finds what he needs (he explains his approach in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs).

Davies shows the seedy side of the dogging scene without being overly judgmental – the violence that begins to be meted out to practitioners by a group of vigilantes is clearly not deserved, and Davis juxtaposes our legal and illegal vices, making it clear he feels that it’s unfair that an act between a group of consenting adults should be deemed to be criminal.

The theme of surveillance runs through The Isle of Dogs – Jeremy always knows where the cameras are, knows the blind spots; he often makes a point of waving when he knows he’s on camera, and wonders if there’s anyone to see. When he becomes victim of crime, the cameras do nothing to help catch those responsible. The CCTV angle sometimes seems a little bit forced, superimposed on the narrative structure, but it’s well handled for the most part.

This is a deft debut that succeeds in explaining, exploring and ultimately opening up a taboo subject that the reader may only have encountered via the occasional sensationalist news story. Jeremy Shepherd is a plausible, intelligent narrator who is ultimately undone by his own over-confidence, by forgetting that however much he enjoys dogging, it’s illegal and not everyone feels the same way about it he does. Most impressively, the final two words of the book left me gasping at the clever and unanticipated twist in the tale.

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