BOOK REVIEW / Warm welcome to the pleasure tome: 'Under the Vulcania' - Maureen Freely: Bloomsbury, 4.99 pounds

MY REVIEW copy of Maureen Freely's slim little novel came with a huge promotional leaflet that looked suspiciously like a cosmetics advertisement. Under the Vulcania, it boasted, would be subjected to the hard-sell treatment of a radio commercial, a full- colour poster, a national tour by the author and '36-copy dumpbins'.

Certainly, Under the Vulcania is the kind of book that is designed to make a quick splash. It is built around the single idea of a sex industry in which the male and female roles are reversed. The Vulcania itself is a hi-tech, high- class brothel-cum-luxury-theme-park staffed by muscular young men, where stressed-out career women can realise their fantasies, for a hefty fee. All tastes are catered for, whether you want to linger in the Palace of Foreplay, or have a yen to move on to something more exciting, on the Merry-Go- Vibrator, for instance.

The novel charts a day in the life of Fiona, an architect with a husband and two children, who decides her batteries need recharging and heads for the Vulcania. We see her relax in the comfort of the Roman baths; watch her being pleasured by disembodied hands and other body parts; and witness the enactment of some rather dubious rape fantasies.

Freely's undoubted ability to write supple, readable prose means she can switch effortlessly from natualism to the surreal. This facility is at its best where the (male) executives who run the Vulcania are discussing such problems as premature ejaculation in the bland vocabulary of business management. But the novel falls too easily into a mere catalogue of exhibitionist effects.

The twist comes when the Vulcania's manager, Raul, turns out to be an old acquaintance of Fiona's. Years ago, their friendship came to an end when he denounced her as a 'whore' and called her a 'professional victim'. Now he seems to be fulfilling his old sadistic hopes - that he would be there to watch if she ever got the chance to act out her dreams of being screwed by a stranger in the dark. You might think that, at this stage, the novel would suddenly switch course and reveal its true self - as a horror story, perhaps? Yet not only is there a rapprochement between Fiona and Raul; she goes home feeling relaxed and purified after her day out.

If the novel is meant to be titillating, it fails: the thought of sex with a man in a reptilian-shaped condom doesn't appeal, any more than the idea of anal intercourse while suspended in mid- air. Maureen Freely could have used her central conceit as a means of providing some genuine insights into sexuality and gender, but, if taken seriously, her satire simply offers moral confusion. Under the Vulcania is a jeu d'esprit, not without panache, but with little in the way of an underlying message.