The grit-lit pioneer

Niall Griffiths's new novel Wreckage begins with a quintessential Niall Griffiths scene. Two Liverpool scallies are driving an old Morris Minor to Wrexham, having just robbed a post office in Wales, leaving the old lady behind the counter for dead. 'Pure f***in' rich we are, lad!' exults Darren to Alistair. 'No c*** touches us now man, eh, we're pure just f***in' saved!'

Regular readers of Griffiths will instantly recognise Alistair and Darren as the two hapless delinquents of his last novel Stump, who embarked on a fruitless mission to seek vengeance on a one-armed former gangster hiding out in Wales.

Wreckage is the story of what happens next, although it will come as no surprise to find that salvation is the last thing on the cards. 'Stump was a comedy: both Alistair and Darren were demented Laurel and Hardy types,' says Griffiths in his soft Liverpool burr.

'With Wreckage, I wanted to bring things to a head. It's about the interconnection of actions. People who grow up with violence only know violence: Darren, for instance, jokes a lot about glassing people. But people do get glassed and it ruins their lives. I wanted to foreground those consequences.'

Griffiths may not yet be a household name but, over the course of his previous four novels, he has proved himself one of Britain's most distinctive writers. The underclass of Liverpool and Wales is his favoured topography; a derelict, inconsolable world which he renders with a mix of high poetry and low dialect that has won him comparisons with Cormac McCarthy and James Kelman.

His novels are full of characters who shrink their universe into a state of eternal present, defined almost exclusively by endless drug and alcohol binges and mindless violence.

Yet they exist within a strongly articulated sense of history, be it one local to Liverpool or on a grander scheme that borders on metaphysics. Wreckage in particular, with its little, wheeling back-stories intersecting like cogs, conveys the impressive sense of characters as small but important players in an epic story.

'I really wanted to show how people are a product of class and history,' says Griffiths. 'Each time I strive to show something that reminds you of their humanity.'

Humanity is a deceptively crucial part of Griffiths's brutal, unforgiving work, not least because he ventures into the farthest fag ends of society to find it - nowhere more so than his third novel Kelly And Victor, a sadomasochistic love story that tested even Griffiths's most loyal readers. Yet few British writers have given such a strong voice to such a neglected demographic.

'There's a real sense in this country that if you speak with an accent, you have nothing worth saying,' says Griffiths, whose own narratives are a savage cacophony of regional vernacular and internalised voices. 'Yet these places (mostly Liverpool's sink estates) are where these huge intense human emotions go on. Why shouldn't you explore big philosophical ideas in relation to them?'

Griffiths admits that his first novel, Grits - a 500-page, multi-voiced chemical stream of consciousness - was partly autobiographical: he had to retreat to an isolated cottage to escape phone calls from the bank in order to write it. These days, he conveys the impression of living a much more settled life.

He is still a marginalised writer - he was conspicuously and outrageously left off the 2003 version of Granta's once-a-decade list of the 20 best young British novelists - and neither is he a perfect one; his mix of high farce, biblical imagery and urban realism is too unrestrained and uneven for that.

Yet in a British fiction scene where Ian McEwan is already widely predicted to win this year's Booker prize, his vital, gut-wrenching modern parables are not only a breath of fresh air, they feel like oxygen itself.

Wreckage is published today by Jonathan Cape, priced £10.99.