There’s so much inelegant confusion in this story of a teenage relay team that a short novel feels far too long. Moz has dropped the baton and what he needs is an editor

Morrissey’s best work was achieved with the aid of a great editor. The lyrics that left fans feeling more tightly bonded to him than they did to their own flesh and blood (“the last night of the fair / and the grease in the hair / of a speedway operator / is all a tremulous heart requires” from “Rusholme Ruffians”; “under the iron bridge we kissed / and although I ended up with sore lips / It just wasn’t like / the old days any more” from “Still Ill”) were made transcendent by having to fit with the jangling guitar beneath them. Smiths guitarist and arranger Johnny Marr’s chiming Rickenbacker music may billow and swirl, but its hidden discipline allowed only the most direct and spare songs to emerge; and its exuberant, uplifting, miasmic sound was the unlikely foil to Morrissey’s introspective, elegiac bedroom angst.

Even the comparatively expansive “How Soon is Now?”, allowing for choral repetitions, contains only 122 words. Would that List of the Lost, Morrissey’s first novel(la), had been subject to similar constraint. Extraordinary to think of a book of 118 pages as too long, but there you have it. Its tale of a teenage half-mile relay team, one of whom is called Ezra Pound, set in suburban Boston in the 1970s, ranges over male friendship, rivalry and sacrifice (a track team of four, of course, echoes a conventional four-piece band), American politics and culture, child abuse and murder, the body, and, of course, sex and its disappointments – but says little illuminating or comprehensible about any of them. Verbose, tangential, unfocused – and, perhaps worst of all from a onetime source of such laser-guided lyricism, linguistically imprecise - it is bewilderingly all over the shop, a slew of mini-polemics through which poke the author’s abiding obsessions and bugbears, all set against a quasi-fabular “story” with no clear plot or, indeed, point.

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Some sentences are pure gibberish. “In servitude is the watcher, asking of the do-er that he assumes all aspects of the watcher’s desire.” “Easy victories do not await, but just rewards seem like a tasty cakewalk, a wrapped-up walkover, so neat and ready to breast the tape.” Mere inelegance begins to seem like a win: “The years pass as quickly as the sentence that describes their speed, yet you cannot believe it until you very suddenly look behind you and see a space once relied upon as being the future.” (Translation: is it that time already?)

The narrative – the team have a big race coming up; they meet a strange “wretch” in the woods whom they accidentally kill; one of them dies after taking a strange pharmaceutical concoction, possibly deliberately because he’s recently happened upon his mother’s corpse; the survivors dig up a young boy’s dead body and then hunt down the man responsible; the big race beckons, and so on and so forth – is fuelled by all those Moz staples: rage; disillusion; the desperation to judge and the fear of being judged; the disgust at the physical embedded in the desire for connection. The failure to make any of this work. As he points out, “life tends to be a cold-storage schlep of mediocrity at best”. The book’s randomly placed forays into the perils of fast food (“little junior blubber-guts orders yet another Superburger with tub-of-guts determination to stuff death into round bellies, and such kids come to resemble their parents as ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag”), or the dawning era of Ronald Reagan and its relation to the cowboy drama Bonanza, are stunted buds strangely grafted on to an already misshapen plant. But Morrissey has never sought to silence his inner ranter.

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And yet here is the devotee’s plight: in the midst of this utter garbage are tiny glimpses of Moz-as-was. “Look at the blue of the sky and tell me why you held back,” he writes, before delivering perhaps the book’s finest line: “Did you think there would one day be a bluer sky and a better hour?” (You can almost hear Marr’s six strings in the background.) We footsoldiers in the Moz army have had more to contend with than this load of old cobblers, which surely could have been improved if someone had cared enough or, more likely, been allowed to. Onlookers will enjoy the deserved kicking coming its way without sharing our pain; and only those who’ve toiled to the end will seize on the subtext in its final plea that “we remember with kindness”. Steven Patrick Morrissey, here is a plea in return: don’t do it again. Although you probably will.

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