Sarah May: The Nudist Colony

Vintage

$24.95


Reviewed by Mark Broatch

If a novelist's aim is to prise some hard-worked nugget of wisdom out of the bottomless mine that is the human condition, then 20-something Brit Sarah May is pit-wise beyond her years.

Her only fault is ambition: her first novel seeks out one more strike-me-down metaphor, one more mundanity revealed to be bizarre, the tying up of all threads into a tapestry that will continue to stir the mind long after the last word is read.

Aesop is a 14-year-old boy living in a London that seems like a series of crazily edited images of a corrupt city.

The parentless teenager is made the "spiv" of a gangland boss, Ludwig, who inadvertently runs him over, a collision of worlds that shows May clearly intends to go on as she begins.

Morality is contextualised, specific, and the book addresses issues such as the innocence of youth and its corruption, disease, colonisation, will and unrequited desire without judgment - it challenges the reader to revisit their own.

Disease is endemic; Ludwig (who works in the "skin", or murder, trade) suffers a slow-acting, flesh-eating disease called borealis contracted from Brazil, where he worked in a rainforest settlement. Aesop contracts a juvenile form of the disease while a character called Dr Achilles searches the world to treat those with obscure, disfiguring ailments.

The few people left in the once-grand settlement are broken, half-mad amid the drenched, fecund landscape. All relationships are stunted: Ludwig and Aesop, Ludwig and his driver, Ludwig and his sister, Aesop's brother Jake and his girlfriend, Achilles and her patients.

The only relationship that shows hope is that of Aesop and Beatrice, the girl brought from the jungle to England to treat her juvenile borealis. There is no fanciness to May's writing but that fails to stop it being redolent of meaning and emotion. So much is unstated in The Nudist Colony that it seems May has slashed a much bigger novel to the bare bones, but has forgotten to cut down the plot in tandem.

If it is often the wont of first-time novelists to throw the kitchen sink of their vision at their readers. I have no hesitation in saying the startling view out of May's window is well worth the price of a little washing up.