Even in a debut, where there's steam, there's fire

Author: By Jonathan Wilson

Date: SUNDAY, June 28, 1998

Page: C5

Section: Books

``Hope'' is a brave and astonishing first novel, rare in that it delivers on its narrator's promise that he has a story to tell that will rock your world. This unhinging story, suppressed in the narrator's imagination until halfway through the book, is a dark, terrifying memory of one child, Gabriel, witnessing the sexual abuse of another child, Katherine, by her parents. The ugly scene features some familiar but nonetheless unnerving props, a dark closet and a pig mask -- components which serve as leitmotifs for the voyeurism and sexual brutality that are this novel's subjects.

On either side of this narrative of trauma in Gabriel Jones's life are records of his adult entanglements with two women: Alicia, the love of his undergraduate life, a bright, affectionate, attractive, intelligent student of the type everyone looking for love hopes to meet in his or her first year at university; and Hope, a high-class London prostitute who, for 150 pounds an hour, will take you to places far beyond the academic curriculum.

Gabriel is seeing Hope, in an agony of confusion and degradation, because he has lost Alicia, and he has lost Alicia in large part because of his addiction to pornography: a craving that, pre-Hope, led to an incident involving himself, a stripper, and a lollipop, a comic/carnal scene that his neo-feminist girlfriend unfortunately happened to witness.

When we first meet Gabriel, he is, in the manner of Dostoevski's Underground Man, holed up in a dingy room in a nowhere land of misery and discomfiture. He works intermittently, hangs out with his best friend, aspiring novelist Daniel, and saves what he can from his dwindling money supply to spend on his hours with Hope. Like the Underground Man, Gabriel is full of self-loathing and frequently acts against his own best interest, the lollipop/stripper routine being a case in point.

The London that contains Gabriel's maudlin but intellectually charged wanderings is less the capital of Tony Blair's ``Cool Britannia,'' with its money and surface glitz, than the contemporary wasteland familiar from novels like Martin Amis's ``London Fields.'' This is partly, of course, because our guide has a hot eye for sleaze, but whatever its narrative sources and raison d'etre, Duncan exhibits a remarkable descriptive capacity and ability to denature an environment in a way that simultaneously reveals both the soul of the place and that of his damaged hero. ``Trucks crawl to the depot like elephants coming to die. At night their lights go out. Some of the drivers sleep in their cabs, with little curtains drawn neatly around themselves, keeping off spying eyes and the swung beam of headlights. In the mornings a ramshackle trailer fills the bitter air with the smell and sizzle of fried breakfast. The air is bitter. . . . Empty cans and bottles roll in the roadside like past-caring drunks. . . . A week ago I saw a small paper bag being windblown down the middle of the tracks. Its bottom corners kept touching the ground, like a child sack-racing away from an invisible train.''

Gabriel shuttles from this ``limbo for the discarded'' to his assignations with Hope, and his actions and reflections carry him past desire to embrace the paradoxes of porn-lust and love. Whether he is perusing skin mags, getting kinky with Hope, or remembering halcyon days with Alison, his and Duncan's obsessive themes are brilliantly circled and turned. I'm not sure anyone writing fiction has quite assessed the contemporary significance of pornography in so striking a fashion and incorporated so many warring perspectives: feminist, hooker, client, victims of abuse, and so on. The philosophical assessment of erotic play in Milan Kundera's ``The Unbearable Lightness of Being'' seems almost dandyish when set alongside Duncan's relentless investigations.

Along with the compelling internal life of its narrator and shocking centerpiece, ``Hope'' also features a wildly disturbing ending as powerful as it is unexpected. If the novel has a flaw, it lies in the area of Gabriel Jones's memories of his university days. Something about the undergraduate mind-set leads to a portentous and pretentious elevation of the mundane, and it's not always clear in this novel that Duncan is approaching Gabriel and Alicia's student angst with the irony it sometimes seems to require.

Nevertheless, this is a brilliant debut novel, and I have a feeling that Glen Duncan has a lot more to tell us about those perennial themes of sex, guilt, loss, and love.