The pursuit of hopelessness is a peculiarly British pass time. Even in the age of Blair, failure is an illicit but consuming pleasure - like eating a scab. From Big Brother to Little Britain we can’t get enough of our own mediocrity. But the ability of the British to indulge in failure is akin to the French taste for wine - we too are connoisseurs. Failure is sown and grown in soils from Giggleswick to the Isles of Scilly, and its bottles are varied. The underdog is the British speciality - our very own champagne.

Aidan Walsh is about to be buried. His life has reached a nadir and a hiatus. What it has not reached is death - which traditionally prefigures a burial. Aidan Walsh is a healthy man in middle life. But his wife is dead, his children have moved out and his factory employers, ‘Sunny Jim Electronics’, are relocating to India. One by one the elements that make up Aidan are being shut down - so he decides to shut himself down. What he opts for is nothing as grand and Continental as a suicide. No - Aidan decides to bury himself alive in his own garden. We are, after all, a nation of gardeners.

So begins Ray French’s new novel Going Under. Set in Crindau, a fictional industrial town in south Wales, it describes, with sardonic humour, a country we can all recognise: ‘Cardiff was like some old lag lying in the gutter who had finally, miraculously, won the lottery, and had immediately tarted herself up with all the worst accessories that new money could buy.’ Urban regeneration: an ill-considered shibboleth of our times.

But this is not a book drenched in disdainful tones. It’s more likely to remind you of Brassed Off and The Full Monty, with a squeeze of Simon Pegg. There’s even the after-taste of an Ealing Comedy. There is pathos and acuity, but not bitterness. Aidan is the kind of loser who is designed to be liked. The kind of loser who ends up being a bit of a hero. But not too much of one - otherwise, being British, we’d stop liking him and start thinking he was smug.

The story arc is clear and satisfying, if a little predictable. We begin with Aidan walking into an undertaker’s to buy a coffin. He decides that they’re over priced (fair enough), so he turns to that bastion of our culture, the pub. A proper, nicotine-stained one called the Globe. Here he finds regular, Pancho - a kind of wannabe Mexican Easy Rider, washed up in Wales. Pancho is a finder and a fixer - a port of call for bizarre orders - including Aidan’s coffin. Surrounded by a vivid, ragbag cast, Aidan digs his hole and buries himself. This isn’t any of your airy magical realism - Aidan’s coffin is a very practical object. Far from escaping life, life comes to peer at him down the shaft he’s constructed to the surface. Naturally the media get involved and Aidan’s celebrity grows. He becomes an emblem of the Everyman, a local hero - an underdog fighting back.

Aidan’s peculiar form of passive resistance takes us down a path that is not purely comic - there is soul and sadness here too. Aidan is an emotionally redundant man, distanced from his children. Ironically, being six feet under brings him closer to his son Dylan. When Aidan is persuaded to run as an independent parliamentary candidate, Dylan becomes his campaign manager. But there is a fundamental remoteness that remains: ‘Dylan took a long hard look at his dad. He wondered if it was like this for all fathers and sons. You longed for your dad to do or say something unpredictable for once. To dare to be different. Then, when he finally did, it made you wonder if you had any idea who he actually was’. For Dylan, his dad is an embarrassment and a mystery.

And that’s the unexpected flavour. The plot has a familiar formula and the whole is a good few pages too long - at times you just want French to cut the literalistic descriptions and get on with it. But the best bits of Going Under are when it’s cold and true. You think you know where it will take you, but then it surprises you by being a bit more real than you thought it would be. After all, this is Britain, and happy endings don’t readily grow on the vine.