‘Clever’ is a double-edged adjective, signifying a degree of intelligence but also often an intellectual smugness or tricksiness, an overbearing desire to impress. Boxer Beetle is undoubtedly a clever novel and a precocious, adroitly-written debut for its 26-year old author Ned Beauman; whether it holds up as something more substantial than an entertaining diversion, a lightweight juggling of heavyweight ideas that ultimately don’t remain airborne, is perhaps another question.

Despite its evident virtues of narrative propulsion and stylistic verve, Boxer Beetle seems like a novel of ideas minced-up and spoonfed for the attention-deficit, I-Pad generation, anxious that staying with any character, theme or situation for more than a page or two will bore the fidgety reader into clicking an icon and tweaking his or her Facebook status instead.

If The Da Vinci Code was a “Google-novel” – each entry providing the next step in the mystery-for-dummies plotline – Boxer Beetle could perhaps be described as a Wikipedia-novel, hopscotching the hyperlinks between clusters of 20^th-Century thinkers and theories: eugenics, Darwin, Nazism, Fascism, Futurism, Schoenberg/ atonal music, constructed languages, architecture/ New Town-planning. Since each concept is engaged with so cursorily, however, it’s hard to see how all this theoretical baggage coheres into a thematic argument of any kind, but perhaps the novel’s overall drift is just this incoherence; in other words, the resounding failure of all those idealistic yet wrongheaded -isms and -ologies the last century began with to better human society in the way they aspired to and the valueless, disenchanted contemporary reality we are left with in their wake.

In keeping with this, Boxer Beetle flits between an effectively drawn 1930s England, in which the creepy beetle-obsessed eugenicist Philip Erskine pursues the amoral East End bantam-weight boxer Seth ‘Sinner’ Roache, and a less convincing present-day scenario which descends into a half-cocked thriller-parody featuring Kevin Broom, a seedy hawker of Nazi memorabilia with an obnoxious body-odour condition. Indeed, the trouble with the characters is that they’re all in fact rather one-sidedly obnoxious and generally fail to elicit the reader’s sympathy other than as studies of skewed and morbid pathology. Many have the air of grotesque caricatures rather than rounded portrayals, especially in the Fascists’ conference held at the country-house Claramore, a blackly comic melding of Evelyn Waugh and the first part of Atonement.

Where Beauman shows most promise is in the vibrancy and alertness of his prose, frequently elaborating sentences astutely balanced between wry comic brio and metaphorical acuity. There are even flashes of insight reminiscent of two of the past masters Beauman cites (in a recent Guardian interview) as influences: Nabokov and Updike. For example:

We had been driving West on the M3, past great drizzly industrial estates where men in overalls tended economies of scale like oxpeckers on a rhino.

But there are other passages where overkill dampens an initially strong image: ‘two unctuous costly pale limp shiny things, one of which was a silk dressing gown that contained the other’ is a brilliant metonymic coupling, but loses its vigour somewhat when two lines later we get: ‘…said the unctuous costly pink limp shiny thing that was not a silk dressing gown.’ (It’s also hard to see how the adjective “unctuous” could be applied to a dressing-gown.)

Boxer Beetle can perhaps be aligned with other recent novels impatient with mainstream realism and more open to Modernist and post-Modernist tendencies: Tom MacCarthy’s C and Lee Rourke’s The Canal, for example. More so than either of these, however, it keeps one foot firmly in the populist camp and –uncertain how far it wants to stray into experimental or genuinely challenging territory –  ultimately falls short of its own ambitious intellectual pretensions.

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