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Footsucker
Geoff Nicholson
Indigo paperback, 219 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)

Call it shrimping, call it foot fetishism, but do call it what the narrator of Geoff Nicholson's splendid little novel does for a good time. He has a passion for feet, a yearning for toes. He gets off on the human hoof: "I decided to take the plunge. I decided to go to hell in a shoe box."

It's all quite innocent. Mostly. Mostly it's behind closed doors, a privacy-of-your-own-home kind of a thing. It doesn't hurt. It's not dangerous. It's not even perverse. Not that perverse, at least. Only when he cuts up magazines to scrap-book models' feet does he stop to think. Only in the collection of shoes and related ephemera secreted in his basement. And only when, clipboard in hand, he approaches women on the street under the guise of an academic.

That's how he meets Catherine, or, more precisely, Catherine's feet - the most perfect feet in the world. And the American, astoundingly, is intrigued by the possibilities of his infatuation. Their affair is torrid and fixated on her extremities and her Fuck Me shoes. And when they meet a cobbler who makes extraordinary FM's, well, what more could a boy's heart desire: "I wanted to fuck her there and then, and there's no greater compliment to a pair of shoes than that."

The first half of Footsucker stands comparison with, of all things, Ballard's Crash in its unlikely - if at least human - sexual preoccupation. Switch wheels for high heels, the internal combustion engine for peep toes, and lurid automotive disasters for a drop-dead assembly of FM's and the woman to wear them. This is where the book is at its very best. The prose is spare, the writing sharp, its inherent humour undercutting the sad and trashy fetish club, the stiletto-propelled wine bar masturbation, even the tatty footwear-driven threesome. However filthy it gets, however near-the-knuckle-deviant, it never loses us, always willing to toss in an essay on foot architecture or expand on their role in a hundred years of cinema. "Eroticism," our hero says, "is about specifics." Either Nicholson has thoroughly researched his subject or there's something he's not saying.

The book's second half is less successful. Having exhausted descriptions and justifications, Nicholson opts for murder. It works, but lacks the dark eroticism and sly wit of the preceding passages. One wonders what he might have done had he snared Ballard's nerve for pushing things just that bit too far. It's part handbook, but not quite a bible.

Whatever, Footsucker has earned an exalted place in the library of obsession, more than just a footnote in the dictionary of fervent fetishism. And if the last 100 pages look like they were just put there to set up a punchline, then at least it's a bloody good punchline. •

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