Blurred Faces, by Allan Radcliffe review: 'an impressive Edinburgh-set novel'

That, I guess, is how dating apps work, or at least the kind predicated on sex. If Davie (as he becomes once introduced) and Jordan are going to be able to build a relationship, everything else - fears of being thought too forward, too assuming, too uncool - follows afterwards. And if readers of a certain age might think this is putting the cart before the horse, it is clearly about time they either accepted reality or found a more up-to-date idiom.

Once the sex has been (discreetly) disposed of, we start to learn everything that the dating app couldn't reveal. In alternating first-person chapters, it becomes clear how wounded both men have been by previous relationships - Jordan by misreading a platonic friendship and Davie reluctant to accept that his long-term partner has become indifferent to him.

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The two protagonists are about the same age (early forties, though both told the app they were in their late thirties) but at first they don’t otherwise seem to have a huge amount in common: Davie, a cafe manager between jobs, is answering the door in a T-shirt advertising Ingliston Truck and Trailer Fest 2004. On the doorstep is Jordan, a London-based TEFL teacher “smart and sober, like he’d taken a wrong turn on his way to the Lyceum”.

After they’ve had sex, though, Davie recognises Jordan from his Edinburgh schooldays, when he was in the year above him. Jordan can’t place Davie: to him, he is just another blurred face from the past. Far more importantly, Davie remembers something else Jordan has evidently forgotten: that when they were at school, he was part of a gang that bullied him for being gay.

Put as plainly as that, the novel sounds both slight and clunky, and so indeed it would be if that were all there was to it. But just as with his debut novel, The Old Haunts - another London-based teacher coming back to his Edinburgh home, come to think of it - Radcliffe has such mastery of his characters as to make readers care about Davie’s dilemma: whether or not he should he tell Jordan his dark schooldays secret. Is Jordan just pretending not to remember? If he isn’t, can their nascent relationship survive?

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The secondary characters do more than just triangulate the relationship of the two main ones - Jordan’s brother Niall and his retired nurse mother are particularly well drawn - and the Edinburgh background (the city has, according to VisitBritain, “the largest gay scene in the country”) is equally true to life, with most pubs and clubs and locations retaining their real-life names.

But the focus remains squarely on Jordan and Davie, helped by Radcliffe’s engagingly restrained style. Take, for example, the moment Davie realises that Jordan is more than a blurred face from his schooldays. It only happens later that night when he is drinking in a gay pub to assuage his loneliness. There’s a snooker game going on in the background, and some of his ex-lover's mates are pointing him out, and all of this registers at least as much as the first stirrings of guilt. Within a couple of paragraphs inside Davie’s head, you have slid back - first by four hours and then by three decades - and you have hardly noticed at all.

The novel’s whole subject lies in this very question of just what it is that sparks a loving relationship from a casual encounter, but it has the subtlety not to provide easy answers. That way cliche lies. Here the relationship is itself fragile, uncertain, undetermined. It’s just hopeful wondering, but it’s more than enough.

Blurred Faces, by Allan Radcliffe, Fairlight, £10.99

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