Sarah Hall: The electric Michelangelo

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON


English novelist Sarah Hall's first book, Haweswater, won the Commonwealth Writers Best First Novel Award. This, her second, has just made the shortlist of six for this year's Man Booker prize. Not bad for someone who's just turned 30.

However, her chances of actually winning are not all that high. She's included in a group of three newcomers, along with South African Achmet Dangor and English writer Gerard Woodward, who are not expected by most commentators to beat the bigger three: Colm Toibin's The Master, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.

And now, having read The Electric Michelangelo, I'd have to agree. Hall's a powerful, lyrical writer, able to paint convincing landscapes of eccentric human experience and address large and frightening themes — yet her central characters remain somehow at arm's length, their relationships mysterious, effortfully moulded, overladen with portentousness and yet irritatingly inconclusive.

Cy Parks grows up in the early years of the 20th century in Morecombe, a holiday town where people come for entertainment and to breathe the good, seaside air, and where his mother runs a guesthouse for consumptives. At 15 Cy is apprenticed to Eliot Riley, "a drunk, a bastard, a master of ink" — an often vicious tattooist, who is nevertheless the best in practice.

Why Cy should be so faithful to Riley, and just what Riley's relationship with his mother was, remain improbably murky. Suffice to say that Cy stays with Riley for 10 years until the older man's ghastly demise, whereupon Cy leaves England for New York, eventually taking a stall at Coney Island, and dubbing himself the "Electric Michelangelo".

And there he meets Grace, a bareback rider and tightrope walker, a European immigrant with a dark past. She employs Cy to cover her entire body with a single, repeated motif, a black-rimmed green eye. She becomes his "Sistine Chapel", and there's real poignancy in Hall's writing about his love for this enigmatic woman, expressed only through his needle.
However, as Europe succumbs to war and macabre horror, so does Grace's body become a battleground. A religious fanatic's hatred brings pain, a frequently referenced theme that blazes to the fore in the novel's last chapters.

Many wonderful passages evoke the demi-monde of the freak show world and the mood of the era, trapped between devastating wars. Hall also has something to say to us, here in the greedy, bored 21st century where entertainment is a god born anew.

Here's Cy, observing the shift in Coney Island's fortunes as 1940 approached: "The people had become unimpressed, like devilish abusers who were filled with ennui, they had molested entertainment, consumed it and driven up their tolerance for being entertained, they wanted bigger, they wanted better, more muck, more magic, and they were not getting it."

Well, there's plenty of muck and magic in here, but they can't quite overcome this novel's core passivity. In the end, a book to admire, rather than love.

* Faber and Faber, $35