Basically, it's about a 28-year old underachiever who desperately feels life slipping through his fingers. Drifting from one dead end temp job to another, he accidentally finds himself in the position where he can rob a bank for millions. The plot involves a ballet dancer who can do an impeccable upper class accent, a bunch of saddoes who dress like the Reservoir Dogs, a gay ex-miner and the IRA. It's very hard to give a flavour of it in a few lines, this section goes to the heart of why he's doing it:
"Across the other side of the garden wall, I can see the back windows of the houses in the next street. In one of them sits a bald man in a bedsit, his curtains are always open and you can watch him making airfix model planes all evening long...
I have started to watch him like it is some horrible mirror into a possible future.
I have no intention of ending up like him.
But then, nor did he.
Watching him, I know the meaning of fear and the power of certainty: nothing could be worse than that, going to prison could not be worse than that. Being an accountant could not be worse than that.
Up till now, I have been able to resist the great end-of-millenium equation (dwindling hope+looming fear = accountancy) by making sure I walk past Charing Cross in the rush hour once a week, to look at the accountants crowded in front of the Departures Board, staring up madly like peasants in front of an icon, waiting to be told they can go at last to wherever it is they do not really want to go.
But I know I am weakening.
I read an ad for Trainee Accountants last week, twice.
No, no, no.
If I become an accountant now, it means I should have become one six years ago.
I cannot cop out now.
I have to rob Michael Winner's bank and save my life."
