England. An England soldiering through fifties austerity. Thomas Penman is a thirteen year-old much given to shitting in little parcels and leaving them about the family home for the unsuspecting. Bowel movements are just his little presents, and he has favoured places. Not that this pastime consumes his life. He also likes to hang-out in the graveyard and smoke and talk dirty with Maurice, son of the officious local priest. And construct elaborate explosive devices with which to torment crabs on the local beach. And tap out Morse messages on the wires set-up between him and his beloved WWI-vet grandfather, Walter. Thomas is, whatever his faults, quite a thoughtful boy.

But then Thomas' family are not the full shilling. Not with that self-same grandfather much taken to hanging his testicles over the banisters at all given opportunities, before retiring to his elaborately filed porn collection with a pot of glue. And especially not with Thomas' dreadful father, Rob, a newspaper wholesaler who sports sunglasses indoors, entertains a mistress called Ruby Round The Corner, and voices headline-informed opinions (invariably wrong) on every pressing matter of the day. Together with mother and sisters, they all live a large, dark house that smells of shit.

Bruce Robinson's debut novel is a disarmingly gentle affair. It's certainly not a book driven by dialogue, which might have been expected of a man who makes his living from screenwriting (an Oscar for The Killing Fields) and directing (the cult eighties item, Withnail and I). Even at its most scatological -- and it is most certainly that -- the sometimes course comedy never amounts to anything more than prankserism and curiosity. Thomas is hardly malicious when he wants to stay for the old man's enema, merely a boy with a naturally inquisitive mind. Boyish things.

And some non-boyish ones too. Like reading Dickens. He loves Charles Dickens, literally worshipping at the writer's desk on a visit to Bleak House because 'its holiness wasn't fake'. And Thomas loves Gwendolin. So he gives her a precious first edition of David Copperfield as a love-token. Thomas grows up as we read, from curious and mischievous child to anxious adolescent. He is more I than Withnail. (That role is cast for Maurice, we suspect.)

It's these latter passages that drag slightly, principally because the love between Thomas and Gwen is so pure, so unsullied that we miss the bite and the spite and shit of the frequently puerile, bottom-obsessed opening, where a prize possession can be a vintage piece of purloined pornography of a woman with a duck up her arse.

There is another strain that runs through Robinson's crisply written, almost Blyton-naive book; one that chimes deeply with the thought that this is really filtered autobiography (silver dollars with 'the luck drilled out', strange fathers, Dickens), but it would be a shame to give that game away. Comparisons with McCabe's Butcher Boy are not invidious -- screenwriting isn't the only thing Robinson is adept at.