Paul Golding's first novel may take its title from the condemnation of homosexuality in Leviticus but the main abomination in these pages is the lonely self-regard fostered in aristocratic boys by the English public school where the story of Santiago Moore Zamora takes shape. The book begins with an orgiastic tour of the sexual underworld in the more hard-core gay clubs and S&M dens in London where the now adult James Moore first spots his nemesis, a sex-worker who advertises his services simply as `Big Uncut Man'.
Their subsequent assignation prompts a flashback to Moore's childhood where the main narrative begins. Golding's decision to structure his novel in this way gives it a curiously conservative trajectory.
Essentially the story becomes an exercise in self-justification - a "why I became gay" tale that seems out-dated and self-aggrandising in the days of pride marches and the rise of the pink pound. Apart from some lines lifted from Abba and a dress-sense modelled from L'Uomo Vogue, Moore's world is sealed off from the pop culture the rest of us inhabit. Perhaps this is all part of Golding's epic plan.
The psychological stage is set in an orthodox fashion by a fashionable and frozen mother, an emotionally repressed and upper-class Anglo-Catholic father and an early childhood spent playing illicitly with his mother's dolls in the family nursery in Spain. "There was a general flavour to my infancy: rich and slightly sickly and tending to warm, like marrons glaces eaten in the sun."
Unfortunately the same flavour taints Golding's prose style which moves tediously from object to fetishised object without the saving graces of dialogue or significant changes in the narrative style. Despatched to his father's Alma Mater when he is nine, it is only a short time before the classics teacher, Mr Wolfe, picks Moore out for "special favours". The feeling of shameful security experienced by the child as a result of this abuse certainly rings true in this alien environment, especially when his father colludes with the headmaster to quash any rumours of sexual impropriety to save the reputation of his old school.
The plot is finally allowed to develop in the third part of the book as a blackmail attempt leads Moore through a chain of treacheries, from Mr Wolfe to Dr Fox in the upper school, and to an increasingly angry confidence in his own worth as a sexual commodity.
Any hope of a moral resolution to this bleak tale is denied in the final exchange between the Big Uncut Man and the narrator. Although The Abomination aspires to a Sadean grandeur, its over-written and portentous style makes an Alan Hollinghurst novel a much more satisfying choice.
Selina Guinness is Lecturer in Irish Literature at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology