You can tell a lot about a book from its cover, and the friends it keeps. Take Rabbits, the new novel by journalist-cum-novelist Hugo Rifkind: the rent-a-quote blurbs include fellow Times columnists and old chums Caitlin Moran and Sathnam Sanghera, as well as Linda Grant and Val McDermid. Each of these minor media celebs sit very comfortably in the cultural Venn diagram intersection that exists between many moneyed, liberal, cosmopolitan commentators, irrespective of which publications they write for, or political views they fill their columns with. They review each other’s books, provide identikit blurb for their covers, and even retweet each other’s views on Brexit. Their mutual endorsements are essentially valueless, the literary equivalent of air kisses exchanged at each other’s book launches at Daunt’s.

But by including them on their dust jackets they hope to attract the same liberal, left-wing readership. Their subjects are tiresomely familiar, whether it is on Empire (Sanghera), toxic masculinity (Moran) or Scottish independence (McDermid), and the positions they take are entirely predictable. We can probably all guess what their views on public schools are (if they attended one they probably feel guilty about it), but just to add to the current rash of self-loathing, here is Rifkind (formerly of Loreto’s School in Edinburgh) to contribute his fictional (but largely autobiographical) account of posh, toxic, adolescent male behaviour.  

Trying to describe Rifkind’s writing style is difficult: his weekly Diary column for The Times allows him to satirise whoever is in the news at the time. It’s clever, sometimes witty, and almost as good as Craig Brown’s equivalent in Private Eye; but it seems to have diluted any distinctiveness in his own writing. His voice, on Times Radio or on the News Quiz, is similar to that of Tommo, the central character and narrator in Rabbits: he wants to be liked, to be that non-threatening posh white male who, through his own light, ironic, self-deprecating, slightly apologetic style, acknowledges his own lack of certainty and authority in a world that no longer reveres young men from privileged Edinburgh backgrounds. Tommo/Rifkind justifies his place by apologising for his presence first. Rifkind’s writing technique relies heavily on short, hesitant, almost stuttering sentences, which is the linguistic equivalent of the current debilitating white, male, upper-middle class guilt. His observations are mostly unremarkable, but he attempts to give them some sheen of originality through this hesitancy, a series of almost-insights that deliberately stop short of a certainty in case they sound too close to the privilege of unearned confidence. His style is the opposite of Martin Amis’s: not a single sentence hurts, wounds, sticks, illuminates, or changes your perception of the people around you. It’s nice. Kinda like a warm bath. But warm baths go cold. You get bored of this. Page after page. Quickly.

There are other weaknesses here which his journalism, written to tight deadlines and limited word counts, necessarily exclude. Firstly, and most damningly for a novel, it is extremely boring. By page 50 nothing had happened other than one posh boy had been killed in an accident (on page 1) and nothing else happens until 336 pages later when another posh boy is shot. In between there are endless parties involving lots of posh boys and girls (with names like Fusty and Barf) getting drunk, stoned, and laid, while they drive around their estates in Scotland. As a reader you keep skimming pages, looking ahead, asking yourself when the plot is going to get going. But it doesn’t. Ever. It’s like a Samuel Beckett play with more drugs and less existential angst.  

Rabbits is set in the mid-1990s, but it may as well have been set in any of the subsequent decades as it tells us little about the political or artistic milieu, other than students were listening to the Lemonheads and Roni Size and mobile phones were just becoming “a thing”. Which leads on to another curious, and frustrating, lapse in technique by Rifkind. For someone who is employed for his ability to credibly imitate the voices of others, Rifkind’s use of phrases is frequently, and surprisingly, chronologically misplaced: did the British really say “bunch” as a collective noun for everything in the mid 90s? Were so many of our sentences concluded by that insidious Americanism “right”? Did we welcome each other with “Hey”, rather than “Hi”?, and did we express our disbelief with “Shut up” as so many, dismayingly, do today? Not to my knowledge. But all these, and other phrases, are “a thing” (sic) here. This is the language of today’s international Westernised middle classes, the Nowheres rather than the Somewheres, who speak the same language, and echo each other’s thoughts, and donate empty quotations to each other’s dust jackets, but it lacks authenticity as much as this book lacks anything of interest or insight. As another famous white Scotsman nearly said, Rabbits is written in an echo chamber, it is full of sound and apology, signifying nothing.