The mystery that lurks along the canals

Nicholas Royle
Friday 17 September 1999 23:00 BST
Comments

The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson (Bloomsbury, £15.99, 264pp)

The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson (Bloomsbury, £15.99, 264pp)

AFTER ATTRACTING critical acclaim for his first three novels, Rupert Thomson suddenly had a commercial hit with his fourth, TheInsult. Brilliant location work - a lost city floating somewhere between ideas of postwar central Europe and Edward Hopper's North America- and the narrative's fundamental ambiguity (can Martin Blom see or is he, as claimed, blind?) made it utterly compelling. Bloomsbury threwa lot of money at the next novel, Soft. While enjoyable and admirable for the way in which the ingenious structure folded softly in on itself,Soft moved towards a conclusion that was too long signposted.

The Book of Revelation, however, is so good it doesn't need a PR campaign. It also represents an extremely shrewd move on Thomson'spart. By devoting 100 pages to a man's abduction and incarceration by a trio of lustful women, he can unpack at leisure a number of malesexual fantasies while examining the differences (if any) between consensual relationships and those in which one party has his foreskinchained to the wall.

In Amsterdam, a dancer leaves the rehearsal studio to buy his girlfriend a pack of cigarettes. He is abducted by three women who keep himprisoner in a white room and force him to submit to their sadistic and fetshistic sexual urges. Hooded and often otherwise undressed, thewomen offer no clue to their motivations.

Determined to survive his ordeal, he starts cataloguing the women's distinguishing features. They are gradually sketched in as characters and,although they must remain faceless, they exert an ominous presence in the narrative, both during and after the narrator's 18 days as theirprisoner.

It's not my wish to spoil the pleasure you are bound to draw from the gradual revelation of what exactly happens to the narrator and how helater reacts. I'll just say that if you think the first half a hard act to follow, the second is even more intellectually intriguing, viscerally grippingand emotionally engaging. The only reason you'll put the book down is to postpone the dreadful moment when you finish it.

The final 100 pages thrum with an exhilarating tension between moments of soaring joy and a constant bass-line of tragic inevitability.There's nothing you want more than for the dancer's story to end happily, and yet how can it when he has been so damaged?

The writing is full of surprises, as if on Thomson's desk there's a card- index full of original similes and descriptions to make you look at theworld afresh ("a pale light, milky, the colour of old-fashioned paper glue"). Walk-on parts are animated by interesting and unusual details.Descriptions of people and places appeal to the senses ("I loved the sweet smell of her, a mixture of parsnip and oat biscuits").

Thomson has made the Amsterdam setting so much a part of the novel, you feel that if this story were to come true, it could take place only inthe Dutch city. Indeed, towards the end is a passage that may be read as a rationalisation for the choice of location. Again, I won't spoil it byrevelation, but it is so subtle and so right, you feel like breaking into applause.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in