Gabriel Jones goes to university looking for love and finds it with the copper-locked Alicia. It's a time of New Man, rising for a certain commitment to the cause, in amongst all the expectedly energetic sex. There are things you don't do.

Like buy pornography. Unless you do it as a couple and because she wants to use it for a relentlessly PC discussion group. That's okay then. Except for the time when Gabriel discovers it tucked only in a drawer and fancies a quick one. Consensual sex, he decides, is all well and good, but not as good as faked, controlled, willing women; when they have The Look.

All power to Duncan for having the balls to try this. There is something of an honesty to these pages that cuts through a lot of crap where men and porn are concerned. The problem stems from telling it in the first person, through such a witless, self-important narrator as Jones. It allows him to distance some truly grizzly writing by embedding it in Amisian prose, larding it up in italics and hyperbole, then slipping it in the mouth of this poised, garish but ultimately stodgy, er, wanker:

"You want to know what fucking Hope feels like? Fucking Hope. I've fucked Hope. They can put that on my headstone: 'I've fucked Hope.' Maybe just leave it with a small aitch. I've fucked hope."

Hope? Hope is a high-class prostitute (call girl?) the now twenty-eight-year-old Gabriel turns to when The Big Revelation splits the dream couple apart. That's the other strain in Duncan's novel: the realising of pornography as flesh and blood action. That is much less successful, reading in part like the one-handed reading he seeks to comment on. If that's his point, it's far from well made.

There are actually two Big Revelations Hope turns on, the second obvious and frankly ridiculous, but one which grows out of the book's most dynamic and painful chapter - a flashback to Gabriel's sexual awakening with the flirty girl next door. There Duncan finally taps into a power and, yes, horror that the rest of the novel can only stand and peer jealously at through the window. There he's finally on to something, but short stories so seldom make for decent novels.