Junk

Tar runs away from his alcoholic parents and his seaside town home. Shortly afterwards his girlfriend Gemma, fleeing her own oppressive family, joins him in a Bristol squat. The rest of the book records their descent into drug addiction and moral putrefaction, a relentlessly bleak chronicle whose tone is vividly modulated by the use of different voices to relate each chapter. Sometimes Tar and Gemma and their fellow outcasts speak, sometimes friends and family who are witnessing their debasement from the sidelines. The former chapters make particularly gripping reading; Burgess takes the risk of providing us with long and undiluted doses of the addicts' self deluding psychobabble, but the chill authenticity of their ramblings is frightening. And underlying almost the whole of the polyphony is a seductive, paradoxical sense of the sheer joy of nihilistic rebellion. This is a complex, multifoliate and tremendously powerful story, that the teenage readers I lent it to found troubling, fascinating and recognisable.