By Thomas Leveritt
Harvill Secker/ Paperback/
256 pages/ $34.95 with GST from Borders

Desire and devastation may seem unlikely bedfellows, but Thomas Leveritt has built his debut novel on true-life accounts of how virtual strangers indulged in pneumatic nooky to block out the hour-by-hour bloodshed of the Balkans War they had enlisted to help end in the 1990s.

In lines throbbing with anger and angst, Leveritt does well in reconstructing their reactions to the senseless violence around them. But he falls far short of approximating satire like, say, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 - which is a great pity, because his fresh voice does funny very well indeed.

Strapping Maori Frito Cooper hits upon a get-rich gambit to mark up cheap Yugoslavian beer and market it as a chic brew to Londoners stuck on the next new thing. Frito finagles his best friend, aimless Bannerman Tedus, into propping up the scheme with him in Sarajevo, in the thick of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

If all the excitement of firefights and black market wheeling and dealing are not enough, Bannerman ups the ante by falling madly for Frito's squeeze, war crimes lawyer Clare Leischman, whose freckles are more remarked on than her professional abilities. The likely showdown between Frito and Bannerman never pans out, though, and so the story wends its way to dissatisfaction.

'Relationships form and dissolve with college intensity,' writes Leveritt of this throwaway generation, which is as apt a blurb as any for this tome.

Strictly for those who like story threads flung at them every which way, as the author seems to have woven his thoughts together with film rights in mind.

If you like this, read: Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal (2006, $18.14 with GST, Books Kinokuniya), in which lippy lothario Bhupinder 'Puppy' Singh swans around with a socialite in his bid to get a leg-up in life, but beds anyone who tickles his fancy whenever she takes her long-lashed eyes off him. Pity he is, like Frito, frozen in adolescence and proud of it too.

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on June 1, 2008.