Fiction: It begins with a dead body, and it ends with another corpse, but Personality is concerned with many varieties of death, most particularly perhaps the failure of illusion and the shallow comfort of dreams, writes Eileen Battersby.
Billed as one of the best of the current generation of Britain's younger novelists - which in itself might not mean all that much - Scot Andrew O'Hagan is easily among the most intelligent. He has a sense of justice as well as a sensitivity that is far closer to humanity than sentimentality.
On the surface, this new book is a familiar story: a little girl, an ordinary child growing up in an drab, ordinary world. A little girl with a big talent that could save her or destroy her.
Her embittered mother, Rosa, herself the victim of her own tragedy, with no father for her daughter and a half- hearted lover-cum-business partner who is about as reliable as the weather, has a local reputation for misery: "Rosa cried so often and so predictably that no one really noticed she was crying. For all the years they'd known her she had been in a state of moderate distress."
It's true Rosa has lots to cry about. All life, for her, is contained in a crummy fish and chip shop in the town of Rothesay, on the Scottish Isle of Bute. Her mother, Lucia, lives off her own fictions: as Rosa's brother, Alfredo, a hairdresser, later informs the reader, "my mother can't tell the truth. She spends her days making up stories about the past".
Whatever about the lies, the family members, as Italians in Scotland, have the difficulty of being outsiders at home. O'Hagan makes effective use of this.
There is something else. Aside from her family's messy story and its outsider status that sets little Maria apart, she has a big voice and can belt out adult songs with a heart-stopping power. Songbird or freak, or a bit of both? This is the dilemma O'Hagan sets out to explore.
The action quickly moves into the weird world of television talent contests, with their appalling formula of partisan fervour and desperation. O'Hagan returns to what seems to have been an earlier, and 1970s British, version of Ireland's recent obsession, You're A Star. He has summoned up a show called Opportunity Knocks, which famously did exist, fuelled by fury and hope, as hosted by a bizarre frontman called Hughie Green.
In evoking a stand-up sing-and-joke variety scene, which appears to have been a combination of downmarket comedy and seaside resort entertainment, the narrative becomes a slice of British social history headed by comedian Les Dawson and other familiar ghosts of the recent past.
Yet by far the most vivid of these ghosts is that of doomed child star Lena Zavaroni, a name not light years removed from that of O'Hagan's fictional girl singer, Maria Tambini. Zavaroni lived and died a victim, of both her freak voice and her anorexia nervosa.
Personality offers an account of Maria's rise, fall and possible survival, complete with its list of famous names. Alongside Zavaroni's tragedy are echoes of the horror that Judy Garland paid for having a voice that was stronger than her spirit.
But O'Hagan never quite succeeds in rendering Maria real, which is strange considering she owes so much to real-life victims. It may be because he looks to too many characters, too many voices and too many individual tragedies. It is alarming to note the speed at which Maria loses her sense of self.
This is a novel that from the start draws mixed feelings. O'Hagan is a good writer, but it is as if his intelligence interferes with his imagination. Yet Personality develops within a subtle mesh of ambiguities. The girl Maria would have once been is quickly erased by her agent, who not only takes over but becomes her client's speaking voice.
While Maria is becoming a puppet, Rosa, the true victim in the novel, is further disintegrating. Throughout the book lurks a thesis about the price of fame and the damage inflicted on the private individual by the creation of a public persona. There are also interesting parallels with another recent novel, Irish writer Colum McCann's Dancer, based on the crazed world of celebrity as inhabited by the Russian ballet superstar, Rudolf Nureyev.
Both novels are concerned with the evils of fame; both develop through various viewpoints and voices, and both wear their technique for all to see. If McCann is looking at mega-fame, O'Hagan draws more on the B list of popular culture. Nureyev attacks his range of possibilities with the greedy energy of a streetwise opportunist soaring as far as his gift can bring him, while Maria is a study in passivity whose emerging self-expression can only be gauged through her increasingly phoney patter with chat-show hosts such as Terry Wogan, itself an adroit pastiche.
Shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize for his first novel, Our Fathers, O'Hagan understands modern culture, its politics, its cringe-making nuances and evasions. To date his finest achievement remains a superlative essay, The End of British Farming, which appeared just over two years ago in the London Review of Books during the foot-and-mouth tragedy. It shows the force of intelligence that is both O'Hagan's strength and weakness as a fiction writer. Personality depends far too heavily on information and cross- references rather than original narrative instinct.
So Maria, having abandoned her loyal school pal and her family, engages in starving herself to death. There is even a cameo of Princess Diana, showing her famous caring side. Maria, like so many teen tennis players, so many little girls with large, adult voices, slides into obscurity; appearances at the London Palladium and on her own television show soon become memories.
In one of several passages in which he replicates media speak, O'Hagan has a journalist report in tabloid style: "Show business insider Steve Wins comments: 'Maria is a much-loved British performer but her loud, stage-school style of talent is going out of fashion. She's really a product of the 1970s light-entertainment world and the end-of-pier variety shows. Her problems are perhaps a sign that it is now time for her to call it quits." Late in the novel, Maria fantasises that she is appearing on This Is Your Life, and that long-distant relatives and friends have been tracked down in the farthest corners of the globe in order to offer a memory of the famous one from an earlier time.
Passive and uninteresting as a character, Maria does and says little. She is a bit lucky, and a bit unlucky. She is no diva and, although pursued by a stalker, she does eventually find a friend and saviour. She never quite engages, nor does the narrative.
For all its insights and narrative order, Personality is seldom more than a low-key, competent novel. While offering its bit about the vagaries of human life, it ultimately, perhaps deliberately, lacks any real sense of itself, having borrowed far too much from yesterday's newspaper headlines.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Personality. By Andrew O'Hagan, Faber, 327pp, £10