The Deadly Space Between by Patricia Duncker

This Oedipus is too comple

It is Oedipus's innocence of his own psychology that makes his tragedy a dramatic story as opposed to a textbook anecdote. When an 18-year-old – the narrative guise adopted by Patricia Duncker in this novel – sets out to demonstrate his own Oedipal tendencies, readers may find themselves muttering Oedipus-Toedipus. All the more so if, like many who loved Hallucinating Foucault, they approach Duncker's novels with the highest expectations of stimulation and delight.

The 18-year-old, Toby Hawk, is the child of Iso Hawk, a 33-year-old painter. On his 12th birthday Toby asks his mother who his father was. "To the mysterious oedipal question... she responded by breaking all the classical rules. She shouted with laughter. She hugged me. 'He was much older... Very sexy, rich and married.'"

This seems an unusual response to a serious question by a 12-year-old. I spent the book wondering whether Iso was a normal woman with a weird son, or Toby a normal boy with an appalling mother. It all depends whether you think Toby a paranoid fantasist or – something he never considers – a victim of maternal sexual abuse.

Large in Iso and Toby's life looms Great Aunt Luce – a fabric designer who lives with her jolly young lover, Liberty. Iso, who left home pregnant at 15, has lived off Luce's bounty, and is estranged from her fundamentalist Christian parents. We know they are unsuitable grandparents for fastidious Toby because they use doilies and eat Mr Kipling's cakes.

Into this world walks Roehm, a cold, bulky man, clearly Iso's lover. Roehm has the qualities of a character in a dream. He is all effect and no cause. Our sense of his personality depends on his impact on Toby, who seems both to want to sleep with Roehm, and to believe Roehm might be his father.

The greatest problem lies in the impossibility of understanding the story's composition. How much is Toby being an unreliable storyteller, how much Duncker impersonating a hysterical adolescent? The Deadly Space Between means to be an erotic ghost story with a deep Oedipal throb. Toby's story pretends to plausibility but is unresolved, cluttered with half-understood allusions.

This is the way Duncker made him, but I expected more. It was her job to make us believe in Toby's fantasy, so that we struck out with him on to the treacherous ice of adolescent insecurity. I felt perplexed; my disappointment lay in never being seduced.

Helen Stevenson's book 'Instructions for Visitors' is published by Black Swan