FICTION: Pigeon English, By Stephen Kelman, Bloomsbury, 263pp. £12.99

HARRISON IS 11 YEARS OLD and caught between two cultures, that of the England in which he has settled and that of the African world he has in his heart – he and his mother have come from Ghana; the rest of the family have yet to arrive. But Harrison, lively, innocent and about to acquire wisdom through a brutal event, is open-hearted and wants to belong. Cultural assimilation may well rest on the brand of sport shoe you happen to wear.

Stephen Kelman’s debut catches the wonder of what it is to be still young enough to see things through a child’s eyes while also being alert to the realities of modern society at its most vicious: “I saw a real dead person. It was where I used to live, at the market in Kaneshie. An orange lady got hit by a trotro, nobody even saw it coming. I pretended like all the oranges rolling everywhere were her happy memories and they were looking for a new person to stick to so they didn’t get wasted. The shoeshine boys tried to steal some of the oranges that didn’t get run over but Papa and another man made them put them back in her basket.”

There are moments such as this when the novel soars and you have to believe in the boy, who has a story to tell but is understandably overwhelmed by the wealth of detail. Harrison’s mother is a midwife: “I don’t know why Mamma has to work at night as well. It’s not even fair. Why can’t babies just be born in the daytime?” Mamma is a great character, one with which Kelman could have done more. Outraged when her son utters a swear word, she immediately reprimands him: “What did you say? I go beat the black off you!”

In Harrison, though, he has created an appealing narrator who almost compensates for the unevenness of the story. At the centre of it is a brutal murder: a boy has been stabbed. “The dead boy’s mamma was guarding the blood. She wanted it to stay, you could tell. The rain wanted to come and wash the blood away but she wouldn’t let it. She wasn’t even crying, she was just stiff and fierce like it was her job to scare the rain back up into the sky.”

Kelman is opening the world of the tower-block flats to the reader; he is giving a sense of the claustrophobia as well as the impersonal. It’s a world in which it is important not to breathe as you run up the concrete steps because of the pools of urine.

The story is the murder, but this seems to drift in and out. At first it seems that young Harrison will set out to solve the mystery because he knows the people who are close to the killer: the truth will out; all he has to do is listen for clues. This seems to be exactly what will happen, as Harrison also has a sister, Lydia, and she has a stroppy friend, the sort of girl who hangs out with boys who carry knives. Added to this is the fact that Harrison’s imagination races and he is very aware of death. “My coffin would be an aeroplane. The dead boy’s coffin was just normal except it had the badge of Chelsea on it.” Late in the novel Kelman reintroduces the image of a casket. “I’d ask for a hell of air holes in my coffin.”

This novel quickly wins the reader with brilliant touches such as an apparent aside: “Jordan doesn’t go to school. He got excluded for kicking a teacher. Excluded means thrown out. I didn’t believe it at first, but even his mamma said it was true.”

Yet almost as quickly Kelman also loses the reader, who is consistently let down by the author’s inability to manage the balance between naivety and sophistication. Harrison’s romance with Poppy is as ineffectual as it is unconvincing, just as the other, more brutal side of teen sex, as demonstrated by his experience at the hands of an older girl, sits oddly in the book. Also seriously lame is Kelman’s re-creation of a 400m race.

The novel runs out of what it actually wants to say very early, and the material is insufficiently developed to carry the author’s intention. Kelman has worked at shaping an individual patois for the characters, but, again, this is not quite enough to carry the narrative. Yes, there is colour, energy, whimsy, innocence and emerging savvy – only not quite enough of any of these elements to make this promising novel, so unexpectedly shortlisted this week for the Man Booker Prize, sing as loudly as it could have.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of T he Irish Times