BOOK REVIEW / Paperbacks: Sugar Cane - Paul Bailey: Penguin, pounds 5.99

'I work with human genitals' are this novel's arresting, New Statesman prizeworthy, opening words. The narrator Esther is a venerealogist whose strange friendship with the rent-boy Stephen - who is in turn linked to a preposterous pimp who styles himself 'the Bishop' - forms the main plot. But Esther's own distressed background and her oddball lover Gabriel Harvey (subject of a previous Bailey novel) provide balancing elements to Stephen's unsettling lifestory. Bailey is a subtle and unblinking purveyor of family heartache and human degradation. But, like his mentor Dickens, he sprinkles them with a plentiful seasoning of eccentricity and sly humour.