This book holds out a more hopeful picture, at least in the short-term. Most teenage novels paint a dismally dystopian picture of a future crippled by political and environmental decay. Only one, the handsome Dino, actually enjoys something like a sex life before he runs into difficulties when his emotions and physical needs refuse to mesh. Jon worries that his girlfriend is too fat, and a butt for cruel humour. Ben has an affair with a randy young teacher, which begins like an erotic fantasy and ends as an ugly form of abuse. When they manage to get some, they are sometimes in raptures, marvelling at the experience like a gourmet recalling a truly splendid meal. What they do have in common is a consuming interest in sex. Having established that this is how a great many male adolescents often talk and think, he is content to observe the conventions of teenage literature, whereby characters do not on the whole speak in as monotonous a way about sex as they do in real life. But for the rest of his story Melvin Burgess reins back on the libidinous fantasy.

If the entire book were to continue in this style it would soon become unbearable. The first chapter, where the main teenage characters Jon, Ben and Dino entertain each other by playing one lubricious fantasy against another, is the toughest, and a potential trip-wire for shocked adults. The novelty is to find it within a book, particularly one aimed at readers still at school. Yet as anyone who has ever overheard and possibly moved away from a group of adolescents chatting loudly about sex on a train journey knows, there is nothing new about this type of talk. It is easily the most sexually explicit novel written for teenage readers to date, and the language with which the main young characters speak, think or fantasise is very frank. Condemned by Anne Fine, the Children's Laureate, trumpeted by adverts on buses ('The book your parents don't want you to read'), Doing It had become controversial even before publication.

Doing it by melvin burgess