The Abomination
Paul Golding
Paul Golding waves a matador's cape at readers and critics with the title of his debut novel. His is a cynical inversion of the ploy used in titling Olivia Goldsmith's The Bestseller and David Leavitt's The Page Turner (Golding's narrator, appropriately enough, is an extraordinarily cynical invert).
While the book doesn't quite live up—or, rather, down—to its ironically self-protective name, The Abomination is, at least, a disappointment. While punctuated with jabs of verbal brilliance, Golding's tale of prep school sexual intrigue and the sinister psychological child-abuse of an upper-crust family ultimately suffers from the same tragic fate as its narrator, a fixation on aesthetic prowess rather than definitive action. Like a bullfighter secretly afraid his sword will fail him, Golding flaps about with great ostentation but resists moving in for the kill.
The novel is bookended by brief sections set in contemporary London. We meet the narrator, James Moore (reared as Santiago Zamora on an exclusive island near the coast of Spain) as he preens his way through the city's bars and sex clubs. While he seems hypnotically lured into this scene, he simultaneously tries to convince himself—and us—that this demimonde of loveless posing and one-night pounding is no longer for him.
Moore's wicked descriptive disdain for his fellow cruisers quickly goes over the top, smacking of self-flagellation.
"View the man properly, with clarity: sure, you like the quick allure of his musculature, but go beneath the sheen of his skin, and, in your bones you will know that when he turns to you and opens his mouth...bound to have sucked on every cock in Christendom and spat into every arsehole in the pagan world, you will be struck by...the collective stench of all the men who pump up and stuff themselves with tuna fish and steak tartare before venturing into clubs in the dark...the festering reek of carrion, like the belches of street dogs fed on the droppings of passing garbage trucks...Think beyond the veneer of his front teeth, think of the rasping surface of his reptilian tongue, and of the abscesses hidden along his gums, and of the tang of his suppurating dental blood, like a slow warm sea, flowing down his gullet carrying in its stream gobs of soft mucus and the undigested fishy remains of his supper..."
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
The novel's bloated midsection offers 334 pages of lavishly described backstory to account for Moore's middle-aged self-hatred. Golding presents his narrator's early upbringing by a nervewracked, glamorously aloof mother and a stern, status-conscious father, followed by a plunge into the alienating world of British prep schools. Isolated by both his emerging sexuality and his Spanish background, Moore seeks solace in relationships with two teachers, whose winky-winky names are Mr. Wolfe and Doctor Fox.
Golding shows his greatest strength in acutely limning the psychological ramifications of consensual sex between a child and an adult. He leaves no doubt that Moore's affair with Mr. Wolfe is marked by mutual seduction. His descriptions of their lovemaking generate a dark frisson in the reader—a potent combination of arousal and repulsion that perfectly captures the sort of distressing ambiguity missing from most of the book (see the quotation above). But Golding also clearly points out the uniquely damaging self-distortion the involvement causes in the boy as he begins to reach puberty:
"Those hairs, so sparse, yet so dark, repelled me, they frightened me...I knew that every microscopic alteration which I suffered...was bound to be detected by him, and measured with regret...I was growing tarnished. I was fast falling in value."
From this point, mid-book, there is little in the way of character development for James. His personality curdles at adolescence. He becomes sour and self-indulgent in his seductions. He knows this, but can't stop himself.
One senses that, guided by a stronger editorial hand, Golding may have been able to run with this brave insight, rather than obscuring it. The overabundance of rococco verbiage that follows makes the novel feel flabby and unfullfilling.
Golding is an effusive, energetic new stylist. There are moments in The Abomination that suggest he is also a profound thinker. Here's hoping that in future work, he allows his ideas to flourish as much as his words.
