RABBITS
Hugo Rifkind
(Polygon, £14.99)

At a time when everyone with a foot in the media door fancies themselves a novelist, Hugo Rifkind has shown considerable restraint. A columnist for this paper in 2002 and for The Times since 2005, he did once pen a largely-forgotten crime caper entitled Overexposure, but Rabbits feels like a “proper” debut, a coming-of-age story drawing heavily on his own background and experience, from the degrees of permissible violence in a private school to “the chalky hash they ship in at Leith”.

Kicking off in 1993, it’s told by 16-year-old Tom Dwarkin. Tommo lives in Duddingston, east of Arthur’s Seat, with his dad, a successful author, and his mum, who is sadly in and out of hospital with debilitating multiple sclerosis. His dad’s detective novels chronicling the cases of a crime-solving butler are being adapted by ITV, and his response to this influx of cash is to enrol Tommo in a boarding school: Eskmount, a veiled version of Rifkind’s alma mater, Loretto.

Compared to his new schoolmates, Tommo feels streetwise (“Remember, I’d been at a day school.”), but interprets his arrival at Eskmount as an elevation to the ranks of the elite. “Like, I was posh before, compared to some people, but now I was posh compared to everybody,” he says. Rabbits recounts his gradual realisation that posh isn’t a group someone can just join. Outsiders will always be outsiders, and none more than those who try the hardest to be accepted.

Beginning with a party in a fancy house – a gateway to “a better, more magical world” – incongruously situated in Niddrie, Tommo’s school holidays become an endless whirl of parties, balls and grouse-shoots. That they all blur into one another after a while merely reflects Tommo’s state of mind at the time; less easily overlooked is how the procession of girls he gets involved with become hard to distinguish from each other, leading to some page-flipping when they’re reintroduced later on.

READ MORE

The Western is reborn in Kevin Barry's gritty The Heart In Winter

John Burnside won’t be forgotten. He lives on in his poetry and novels

His closest friend, Johnnie, whose family runs a Perthshire farm in a complicated ownership tangle, has been badly affected by the death of his older brother, killed by a gun accidentally discharging while he was driving his Land Rover on a bumpy track.

Eventually expelled, Johnnie returns home, so when Tommo isn’t partying he’s at the farm, getting stoned and shooting rabbits from a Land Rover every night, while watching Johnnie fall apart under pressure to sell the farm and suspicion of his involvement in his brother’s death. When he approaches Tommo to help him get his farm back, it’s unclear how far he intends to go, but we can reasonably fear the worst.

Rabbits thrives on Rifkind’s sharp and succinct social observations, whether in the boarding school dormitory, the Georgian New Town mansion or the grouse moor, while Tom’s fascination with the landowning class gradually exposes what lies beneath the glamorous surface: the bitterness behind the bravado as their houses crumble, farms fail and prestige slips, leaving them only their insularity to fall back on. Still, despite his feelings of insecurity and the glaringly obvious tension that characterises his relations with his posh friends, Tom persists in believing that he’s worked his way into their ranks.

Related by an older Tommo looking back through wiser eyes, his story is a wistful and somewhat sombre one of doomed love and a search for acceptance and a place in the world by a boy feeling distanced from his family and unhappy with himself, who thinks friendship can bring about transformation, but in the end can’t escape himself.