Rat Race is a semi-autobiographical novel set in the 1980s in Margaret
Thatcher’s Britain. It focuses on Paul, who has just graduated and
wants to be a writer. He faces overwhelming pressure from everyone
around him, however, to ‘get on’ and join the Rat Race, against his will
and in sharp contrast to the alternative lifestyle he wants to live. Pretty
soon he finds himself on the scrapheap and having to compromise his
beliefs in order to make something of himself. Rat Race is one year in
his life, charting his fluctuating fortunes, set against a background of the
music and fashion of the alternative scene at the time. It is also a love
story, as he meets and falls in love with the girl of his dreams, and all
the trials and tribulations that brings with it. Rat Race is an alternative
view of growing up in the 1980s, the flipside, a savage indictment of the
Thatcher regime, punctuated with some of the writer’s own poems
written at the time, which provide a juxtaposition to the sometimes hard-
hitting and brutal prose. Rat Race is a novel about many things, but
most of all the pressures on the young to achieve at any cost in the get-
rich-quick society in which they find themselves.