Neil Bartlett - Skin Lane

It’s hard to write to much about this book without giving away it's secrets, and I'm going to do that even though it’s one of those rare novels where I really feel I shouldn’t. So, you've been warned!

Skin Lane is set in 1967, the year in which homosexual acts between consenting adults, as the terminology goes, were decriminalised. Mr F, (the F stands for Freeman) lives a life that is the opposite of his name, and is surprisingly innocent and middle aged when he experiences desire for the first time (the imagery that captures this – a series of dreams that are literally an awakening– is a stroke of macabre brilliance that makes me rethink doubts I’ve had about the potential of dreams in fiction). A furrier, surrounded with the blades and the blood that are the accoutrements of his trade, Mr F becomes obsessed with the sixteen-year old nephew of his employer. For most of its progress, the novel seems to be treading a path of sexual obsession and violence and approaching horror with which readers of novels by Patricia Highsmith or Ruth Rendell might be familiar – and to be praiseworthy chiefly for doing it so well.

Then, in a moment of startling grace Mr F and his potential victim are spared what seemed inevitable. The slow build up of tension, and then the withdrawal from absolute violence and horror in a way that is both believable and not anticlimactic is brilliantly handled. It’s not until the ending that the motif of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast is finally explained - Mr F identifies both as Beauty and as Beast, and Beast is just a label, beneath that lies the wasted potential of someone who has not learned to express his desires, yearning somehow to break free. And of course, there is a climax, here Bartlett borrows the gothic convention of the fire that explains why the building at 4 Skinner Lane is now a copy of the original.

There are other aspects of this novel that are quite brilliant. The way that London comes to life as a place that changes and grows almost like another character, for instance. And the way you realise that in Bartlett’s world, the real horror is the unlived life. Bartlett has been shortlisted for the Costa for this (as he was shortlisted in its previous incarnation as the Whitbread, the year Beryl Bainbridge won for Every Man for Himself) and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he pulls it off.

Haruki Murakami - After Dark

From the beginning of this sad, brilliant little novel, the city after dark is a creature that seems to live, breathe and pulse. Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the places: it’s not the same as in daytime, Murakami’s narrator tells us. But what is it?

Odd things happen to two sisters, one who can’t sleep and one who can’t wake. The sleepless sister, Mari, is spending the night in fast food restaurants reading from a thick book when trombone-player, Takahashi, stops to talk to her. Later, each is involved in the questioning of a Chinese prostitute who has been beaten up at a nearby love hotel. Meanwhile, Mari’s sister, the beautiful Eri, is watched while she sleeps and as she and her bed are transported somehow inside her television set. And with what seems miraculous discipline, very little is explained, we (the narrator uses the first person plural, inviting us to observe the action as though we’re jointly a camera) move from one scene to another, each section told in a spare and elegant first person prose.

The novel is filled with screens and mirrors and strange connections. Shirakawara, responsible for beating up the prostitute, returns to his office and works on his computer, he wants nothing more than not to go home, like Mari, who can no longer bear to watch her sister. Mari’s image somehow remains in a bathroom mirror in the long moments after she has turned and left the room. Eri threatens to be lost forever as the screen behind which she is trapped flickers, its reception waning. The room where she is trapped, looks like Shirakawa’s office. Shirakawara buys a fishcake, and Takahashi later has a fishcake. But why?In the closing pages, morning approaching, we are offered some sort of solution,

a cycle has been complete, all disturbances have been resolved, perplexities have been concealed, and things have returned to their original state. Around us, cause and effect join hands, and synthesis and division maintain their equilibrium. Everything, finally, unfolded in a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure. Such places open secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light. None of our principles ahs any effect there. No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out. (176)

Is this enough of an explanation? It is all that we are going to receive. And it works, beguiling us into believing in this pitch-perfect, mysterious little book.