Raveheart by Graeme Armstrong: veers from endearingly silly to deadly serious – stimulating but not necessarily cohesive

Raveheart 

Raveheart – Graeme Armstrong’s satirical follow-up to best-selling debut The Young Team – starts with a brilliantly hilarious concept: after Reform-style authoritarians the ‘New Greatest Britishest Party’ ban electronica, former ice rink DJ William ‘Turbo’ Patterson launches a struggle for the right to rave. 

Armstrong’s humour is the book’s best aspect. Throughout, his Patterson persona serves as a satirical acupuncturist: pin-pointing exactly where on the body politic his needle-sharp jabs must land for maximum comedic effect. But half the time Armstrong speaks over Patterson to politically preach to the reader, and ends up dulling the point of his critiques. Patterson’s quite unlikely concern with lecturing the reader, above living his own life, makes it hard to stay immersed. 

And the novel is padded with these interruptions, so that one half of a storybeat and the next are separated between 20 pages of interesting but lengthy and out-of-place exposition. More than 200 song titles are inserted into the text itself at the exact moment Armstrong wants us to hear them – a nice concept with problematic execution. Apart from questionable pacing, scenes rarely lead onto each other quite organically, with plot points reaching dead ends followed by others that come out of nowhere. Even Armstong’s humour, despite being the main aspect that really keeps you entertained, eventually brings its own issues. 

Raveheart  is full of political insight, but its mad-cap, nonsense comedy becomes a bit jarring next to these serious points. Likewise, the novel’s plot and overall tone fluctuates from endearingly silly to deadly serious, which is certainly stimulating but not necessarily cohesive. This is particularly an issue at the novel’s fanciful ending, which arguably betrays the reader’s investment in the otherwise well-drawn and human characters. 

For those who enjoy experimental fiction or have a keen interest in Scotland’s rave culture, Raveheart may well be a good time. But as much as I wanted to like the book, it’s hard to rave about it to the general reader – the book’s ultra-specific, sometimes laugh-out-loud jokes simply aren’t enough to keep the reader engaged over 400 pages of awkwardly threaded, albeit high-concept, writing. 

Raveheart is published by HarperCollins