HOME | ABOUT | FICTION | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES | REVIEWS | NEWS | BUY THE PRINT MAGAZINE | BACK ISSUES | LINKS | CONTACT US

The Book of Revelation
Rupert Thomson
Bloomsbury hardback, 264 pages, £12.99
Published August 1999
ISBN 0747544395

Also available as a Bloomsbury paperback
Published June 2000
ISBN 0747545693

Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)

Rupert Thompson is the master, nay the veritable King, of the almost book. No, let us crown it: The Almost-Book. Being, a text crowded with life-full characters, elegant wordplay, emotional engagement. A sense of purpose, a determination to achieve. In other words, a good book. All of Rupert Thompson's books are good books. He is probably the anti-Tom Clancy in that – an author forever damned by the gods of talent. And yet.

Air and Fire, The Insult, Soft; Almost-Books to a man. Books that, for all that they invite us in, make us welcome, nonetheless sour our relationship with the end fast approaching: Thompson hasn't done it again. These books don’t end so much as peter out. It’s like we’re promised a day out at the seaside, only to run out of petrol just as the coast hoves into view. The Insult gets closest, but even that fails. Thank god Thompson makes the journey as entertaining as he does.

Amsterdam. A British ballet dancer, out to pick up cigarettes for his girlfriend, is kidnapped. Taken off the street. By three young Dutch women who proceed to engage him in eighteen days of bondage and torture. He’s chained through a piercing they make in his foreskin, forced to masturbate for their amusement, fuck on demand, his naked body is used as a lavish banquet platter. Helmut Newton fantasies that cost many a Tory MP top dollar. And then he’s free.

Like that. Gone. The remainder of book is taken up with attempts to understand and assimilate what was done to him. Who were his captors? What did they want? Can he find them again? Can he relate to his girlfriend, his family?

Thompson is playing with ideas of sex and sexuality. Of sexual violence that, for once, is perpetrated by women against men. Of the dancer's unconscious responses to the women’s advances, their provocative nakedness, their use of fetish conventions to, if you will, get a rise out of him. He is victim and participant, submissive innocent but physically complicit. Thompson’s skill – how he keeps the book afloat – is in convincingly inhabiting this psychology, opening and closing the book in the first person, but, crucially, giving us those eighteen days as observers. It’s clever and, in the aftermath, not unmoving.

But it’s also clever in that Almost way. The Book of Revelation is a work of very few revelations. Thompson sensibly doesn't explain much, but, again, ultimately ends up never quite explaining enough. The end is enigmatic, the build-up to it hobbled by the dread fear that even the author doesn't know what to do next. His writing, as ever, is terrific – ‘The air smelled of distance’; ‘labia that were uneven, swollen, slightly ruffled, like the pages of a book that has fallen into water and then dried out’ – and the book, like the preceding Soft, is designed to perfection. These are the things that give us the patience to ride out his failures. One day, Rupert, one day.