The past is a foreign country

Perhaps it is not the author’s best book.
A brilliant young student is dragged by a friend into a descent into hell: first gambling, then drugs, until he even risks becoming implicated in a rape.
Faced with extreme violence, he reacts by saving the girl, and in some measure saves himself as well.
The narrative premise could well be interesting, but it drags sluggishly along, offering neither plot twists nor any psychological probing of the motives behind behavior so vastly divergent from his past life.
It almost seems as though the character were weak, someone who had always passively endured what was expected of him, only for his true personality to surface under his friend’s pressure.
The style wavers between that typical of atmospheric crime fiction and that used in introspective narratives: the synthesis is sheer tedium in the reading.