Fiction: Anyone harbouring a deep devotion to, or perhaps merely a passing interest in, the art of tattooing will thrill at the idea of The Electric Michelangelo. However, if tattooing does not hold any level of fascination for an intending reader, this slight though tediously overlong period yarn is not for you, writes Eileen Battersby.
Among the many problems Sarah Hall's disappointing, not very funny, not very serious second novel bears, is that of déjà vu. No matter how hard one tries to engage with a narrative top-heavy with obvious gimmicks, it is difficult to shake off the feeling of having read it all before, and that the first time it just seemed to be better, if not all that good either.
Cy, sometimes Cyril, Parks, likely lad, son of a decent widow who keeps a seaside guest house always open to visitors dying of consumption and other messy diseases, is the non-hero not only of the book but of his life. At no time does he emerge as a real character. Hall has sufficient panache to create the impression of having read a great deal of the late Angela Carter's work, without having learnt too much. She has a voice that tends towards the knowing tone cultivated by writers such as John Irving. Throughout the book she manages to sustain a sense that finally something is going to happen - but nothing does. For Hall, her central ace is the basic one - if in doubt, simply kill off, or maim, whatever character the author, never mind the reader, is weary of.
Young Cy, while still a child, becomes privy to some of the darker things happening in his mother's boarding house. Dying guests spitting up gluey blood into basins is but a small part of this:
The consumptives in his mother's hotel coughed up blood into their basins and handkerchiefs hourly. They did it earnestly, guiltily, as if each time fulfilling a pact with the Devil himself that in the matter of their failing health there would be those intolerable moments when the undersigned must bring up their monstrous, viscous, bloody end of the bargain, involving immeasurable discomfort on their behalf, for the Devil had his humorous perversions after all, before they were allowed future reprieve and life.
Existence in Morecambe is not all that interesting, though mother Reeda does her best. Hall certainly makes use of the kindly hotel-keeper and, as expected, the good woman also does her bit in the provision of back-street abortions. Hall also sets out to exploit the seaside setting of her story; after all, seaside towns are places that live in the summer and die in the winter. Yet even this obvious device of contrasts falls short. Instead Hall concentrates on the exchanges between the characters, none of which prove enlightening.
About the most consistent characteristic given to young Cy is his height. We are often told that he is taller than his friends. Why we need to be informed of this fact quite so frequently may be attributed to the slightness of the narrative. As expected, a mentor is required for the fatherless boy. Enter Eliot Riley, tattoo artist, troublemaker, eccentric and perhaps, at one time, very close friend of Cy's mother.
The tone settles into a jaunty banter. Hall's approach is conspiratorial, as if she expects the reader to be on her side;on this performance, she has not earned such cooperation. Mother dies. Riley dies. Cy, finally his own man - and perhaps, hopes the reader, about to become a three-dimensional character - sets off to the New World to work as a high-class tattoo artist.
In these sequences, Hall not only fails to salvage her novel, she allows it to slide into the complacency of the obvious, shrouded in her Baroque prose. Dark, wet, early 20th-century Morecambe, still very much an Edwardian enclave, is pitted against the fuller vulgarity of Coney Island in its heyday:
Coney Island, as it turned out, was Morecambe's richer, zany American relative. A fat, expensively dressed in-law with a wicked smile and the tendency, once caught up in the mood, to take things too far.
Suddenly, Cy has become a larger character, if only because he is now an Englishman in a US populated by brashly speaking Americans and, of course, a hand-picked assortment of mysterious Europeans courtesy of central casting.
One of these is Grace, whose eyes are "territorial and displaced and dark". She lives with her horse, Maximus, in a the room downstairs from Cy's cell. Whereas mood proved the medium for Hall's atmospheric début, Haweswater (2002), this time she has opted for the grotesque - but it neither engages nor compels, aside from the cruel public execution of Lulu, a long-serving fairground elephant whose accidental step backwards crushes a man.
If The Electric Michelangelo is best described as an eccentric romance, the tedium of reading of how Cy sets out to decorate Grace's body with more than 100 tattoos featuring an open eye is more endurance test than narrative pleasure. Grace is no ordinary anti- heroine either. Not even Angela Carter would have pushed the traditional fairytale quite so far.
Any novel must be assessed in its own right, not in the context of literary prizes. But comment must be made here. Prior to its unexpected (and ill- deserved) Booker longlisting, The Electric Michelangelo seemed a silly, drawn-out, self-indulgent work. Now, having been shortlisted at the expense of several superior books, such as Ronan Bennett's profound allegory, Havoc, In Its Third Year, not to mention A.L.Kennedy's Paradise (which didn't even make the long list), Sarah Hall's scant effort underlines most of what is wrong with contemporary English fiction.
The Electric Michelangelo By Sarah Hall Faber, 337pp. £10.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times