Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Many readers in America haven’t heard much from Rupert Thompson, a rising British author. In fact his latest novel, “The Book of Revelation,” has just jumped the Atlantic and is raising many critic’s eyebrows.
Filled with a mix of sweet prose and masculine action, “The Book of Revelation” starts with a nameless protagonist on an errand to the corner store for a pack of smokes. From that simple start, Thompson creates a bizarre and originally scary premise of male abduction.
Thompson skillfully introduces the protagonist’s desires and fantasies in the first few pages. The main character is a dancer by trade, living out a corrupt life in the infamous city of Amsterdam. This becomes ultimately ironic when the dancer gets abducted by three women dressed in long, black robes with hoods covering their faces.
The nightmare then unfolds as the three women, all different in personality, chain the dancer to the floor and reduce him to their personal sex slave. Fighting off repulsion and disgrace, the dancer eventually befriends one of his captors, only to have the other two to find out. For punishment, the women pierce his foreskin with a screwdriver. The hole is then clasped with a steel ring which is tethered to a chain.
Figure out your own metaphors for that one because Thompson doesn’t let us in on any of it. Only a chapter later, when it looks like the dancer is doomed to be a sex object that is raped by the women nightly, they let him go. From this point in the book, the story turns into a twisted “coming out” piece. The dancer tries to tell his loved ones why he was missing for 18 long days but his story of being held up in a random flat in Amsterdam, chained to the wall by his penis, while three beautiful women ravage him daily, isn’t being bought.
In an attempt to figure out why he was abused in such a macabre way, the dancer commits himself to search out the women. His plan is to sleep with as many woman as he can in order to come across the right ones. This doesn’t work because as years pass his “holy grail” seems miles away.
Strung out on drugs and alcohol the dancer looks inward at his experience and decides to travel the world. This part of the book really reaches into the dancer’s damaged psyche, but the reader loses interest in the dancer’s journey because Thompson has taken us so many places for answers. Only more self-exploration and self-flagellation is given to us by the author.
Thompson’s style is sappy in parts but baroque in others. He blends the romantic with the tortured. Many parts throughout “The Book of Revelation” are beautifully written, while others are haunting and gothic.
Thompson also creates role reversal in the subjects of sex, power and the damaged soul. He bends the genders and comes away with a new take on masculinity that is frightening and tragic.
“The Book of Revelation” isn’t a great Sunday morning read, but it’s a good read when you have a three-hour layover.
Bangor Daily News