The Davenport Files, by Philip Marshall, Riverstone Books, review by Abby Cunnane.

IT’S not uncommon for a novel to give you the sense of eavesdropping on a conversation.
At best this is delightful, absolving you of all need to participate, or feel guilty, and bookish conversations can often be so much more satisfactory than real ones.
At worst it engenders the same kind of helpless fury that you might get overhearing an inane dialogue on a bus.
Regrettably, The Davenport Files too often falls into the latter category.  
The book’s haphazard course is dictated primarily by the dialogue (perhaps it would make a better stage play?), loosely narrated at points by “a ubiquitous youth with a bad case of acne”.
It follows the development of a group brought together as teens. Central character Dennis Davenport and the other lads exist in a smutty, nicknamed and brutish world, while the lasses are typecast in a series of predictable roles: buck-toothed-cardiganed-swot; busty-easy-blond; officious-mature-student.
This motley crowd moves onto university, with each of the types degenerating along conventional lines, and we are introduced to a line-up of crooked professors including the misogynist idiot savant Grudge, the lecher Prof Flannelcock and the split personality Prof Dopson.
The boys become grow up to be boors, variously hard-drinking, sex crazed and corrupt; the girls develop along similarly unhappy lines, and pairs are formed among the ill-assorted social group.
What is strange is that the author’s position seems to be mocking all these characters; sympathetic to none, he subjects the reader to a series of maladjusted individuals who elicit little but scorn and irritation, with occasional genuine humour.
If you must read it, there is only one way to approach fiction like this: accept it for the farce it is, go in with eyes open, and possibly with a stiff drink at your side to wash it down.