The kids meet each other to relieve their boredom through play-stations or TV games, visit malls to attire themselves in the latest brand gear, and already have plastic money and “practice for the day when they turn eighteen and become eligible for major credit problems”.

Every child in the school has a cell phone, bar one, and she is making a statement through its absence. Cell phones dominate ‘Graffiti my Soul’. When a pedestrian is knocked down and cowed by the youths disguised in Nike gear and hoodies, the object is to photograph the victim’s fear before escape on the latest-brand bicycle.

Catching another kid on cell-camera in a compromising position guarantees social status for at least one school day: “Evidence, good photographic evidence that you carry around on your phone, is the new Top Trumps. Everyone’s doing it”. The medium of cell phones are how these teen relationships are initiated, conducted, and terminated. The phones also figure in the central theme of the book, which is the death of Verapeen’s girlfriend, Moon. The chapters flicker between tenses; scenes of before Moon’s death and after. Everything leads up to her demise, which only takes place in the last pages of the book, and the tension and mystery of how she dies is maintained throughout.

‘Graffiti my Soul’ is therefore a tragedy, but its pace and style, which lead the reader in from page one, also grace it with comedy. Belly laughs abound; Govinden fills the text with wry humour: “The girls always go for my hair, thick and black, stiff like a cherub who wants to get it on”.

There is plenty of the local slang, some of which is hilarious, some difficult to understand; the reader could be helped with a glossary of the hip terminology. The kids are pampered with material goods yet starved of affection by their parents, most of whom are sadly lacking in maturity or depth themselves; some are even pathetic and downright neurotic.

Veerapen displays remarkable insight into how these adults function: “Casey laughs the brittle, dry laugh which adults are so good at when they are trying to show you the weight of experience which they carry on their shoulders”. But at times his insight is too astute, and stretches the credibility of his fifteen-year-old character.

Violent scenes pervade; school cred hinges on who beats up who, and even the girls are thrilled by it and give sexual favours to the victors: “We all know that it’s a sickness, but we can’t help ourselves”. Prejudice against homosexuals flows through the book and there is also Paki-bashing and discrimination against minority groups in the schoolyard.

Govinden brings us an intimate view of how the Surveillance Nation has essentially failed to provide meaning for the younger generation. Against the dismal backdrop of squalor, betrayal and gossip, the kids somehow manage to form friendships, conduct romance, set goals and elicit humour from their situation, albeit with large doses of cynicism and almost a worldly-weariness.

A good, fast read.