Cherry, by Matt Thorne

Weird goings-on under a collapsing ceiling

Matt Thorne's sixth novel is not the book it seems to be for the first 50 pages or so. This is not a bad thing. It is a good thing.

You "think" that you're getting a ludicrously implausible and far-from-original story about 23-year-old Steve Ellis, a feckless teacher who can't get a girlfriend and invites strange men back to his disintegrating flat on the flimsiest of pretexts. There's the septuagenarian Sinatra fan he meets in a pub and the boring bloke in a blazer encountered at his parents' house: both end up back at the flat with the collapsing ceiling.

Then there is neighbour Len, whose speech is an uncontrolled deluge of profanities. Perhaps you'll begin to lose patience when Soumenda, an Indian with a clipboard, turns up claiming to represent YPW - Your Perfect Woman - and to be able to fix Steve up with his fantasy partner if he wouldn't mind answering a few questions. So far, so whimsical.

Somewhere before the halfway point of this refreshingly short novel, it gradually dawns that this is a very different kind of book. It doesn't matter that it's scarcely believable; it's not meant to be. The moment you give in to its faux-naif weird charm, pitched between Rupert Thomson and David Lynch, you start to enjoy it. Once Steve meets Cherry, in the bar of the mysterious Tenderloin Hotel, and she seems to conform to the specifications of his perfect woman, the novel acquires that most wonderful and blessed quality unique to good books: it is hard to put down.

It doesn't matter that Cherry sometimes seems written in haste (what's the point of the man in the blazer, since he does not reappear? Why is there one lonely footnote? Surely a few would be better, or none) because it's a very fast read. It doesn't matter that most characters read like ciphers: they're meant to. Steve can never be sure if they are for real or part of an elaborate conspiracy masterminded by the increasingly sinister Sinatra fan, Harry Hollingsworth.

Thorne considers the schism between Hollywood romance and hardcore porn: "The reason why neither the conventional love story or the hardcore pornographic movie completely satisfies is because the division of the natural pairing of love and sex has made each separate part seem strange." Not half as strange as when Thorne combines them in Cherry, a romance packed with scenes of explicit sex that are probably too prosaic, lacking as they are in ill-advised metaphor, to win the author a nomination for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Prize.

The novel works neither as a straightforward love story, nor as literary erotica. It does work as a puzzling fantasy that's a successfully odd blend of both.

The reviewer's novel 'Antwerp' is published by Serpent's Tail