We Are All Guilty

After Clive Rayner, an unemployed teenager, breaks into a warehouse and inadvertently injures the night-watchman, his sense of guilt is more powerful than either the authoritarian stance of the police or the protestations of his defence counsel that society is the real culprit. The portrayal of working-class characters, particularly Clive, is unconvincing and frequently patronising, and the teenage dialogue is a curious mixture of 1950s' and current slang. The final chapters are less than engrossing, so readers may miss the point of this essentially moral tale.