Wasted Book

Aiden Shaw would make a great radio writer. His new novel Wasted displays all the virtues and drawbacks of that fact. The story of a couple, Joe and David, their nephew, his girlfriend and the former girlfriend of David, Flora, Wasted is about lives lived amid a cascade of pills, powder and liquids. But this isn't some Irvine Welsh-style panorama of drug-addled urban dystopia. Every page is sequinned with camp wit and the incessant dialogue flashes and glitters. When Shaw tries his hand at prose, he's less successful. Don't look here for inventive description or vivid characterisation. It's the zinging speech that makes the book. There's not much plot, although there is a subtext of redemption from dizzy debauchery through the creation of artworks--a possible biographical note being sounded by Shaw. He has, after all, metamorphosed himself from being Britain's best known porn-star into good-looking novelist. So good looking in fact, that not only does the standard author-mugshot adorn the back cover, but he's on the front cover as well. If you want a few hundred pages of witty banter about love lives worked out in every possible combination, and fuelled by every imaginable drug, Wasted does nicely. --Alistair PeggRead More