The Deadly Space Between: Reissued
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Patricia Duncker's previous books have been cerebral, involved tales (as is indicated by their titles, like Hallucinating Foucault, or Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees). The Deadly Spaces Between, by contrast, is painted with a lusher, warmer emotional palette. The tale is told from a masculine perspective, with conviction and some verve. The narrator is Toby Hawk, the teenage son of a famous female artist. The setting is a "draughty, comfortable, mid-Victorian mass of red brick and white gables", deep in the rainy English provinces. Living alongside Toby and mum are a grandiose lesbian great aunt and her posh lawyer partner Liberty. All very emancipated. Yet, despite the unorthodox nature of this menage, the atmosphere in the house, as Duncker artfully sketches it, is positively bourgeois in its stasis. These people are glib and inert; nothing can disturb their complacent bohemianism. Then Duncker puts some mustard on the novelistic sandwich. A dark stranger comes, "a huge heavy man with a black car". This abrupt intrusion of this animated, brainy scientist, Roehm, throws the "Amazonian triangle" into a tizz, and kicks off a mystery that will take young Toby to London and beyond--to gay bars, opera houses, biology labs, ski runs, as well as the darker recesses of scientific history. The result is at once clever, dry, confusing, elegant, reserved and, just occasionally, exhilarating. --Sean Thomas
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Sunday Telegraph
Patricia Duncker writes beautifully with a flamboyant immediacy
--This text refers to an alternate
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First Sentence
She came home smelling of cigarettes. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
She came home smelling of cigarettes. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The world to introverted eighteen year old Tobias Hawk is one surrounded by women. His artist mother Iso raises him in a careless fashion having been cut off from her religious family for giving birth to him at the age of fifteen. The brutalities of the world do not touch his mother who is protected in a self serving way by her wealthy aunt Lucy. Toby's own obsessions with Iso are a dark underlay to his life and this is all he wants. But it all changes when his mother takes a lover.
The enigmatic Roehm fulfills many roles to Toby and Iso - father, lover, initiator to the rites of worldly men. The relationship lines are blurred and Toby finds himself torn between the urge to keep the life he has always known pure from other influences and his desires for Roehm. Neither mother or son can resist the dark attraction of the mysterious Roehm, man without a past, and seemly impossible to base in the reality of the present. Roehm seems to know their unvoiced thoughts and fears, and is a master in manipulation.
The searches Toby makes on the Internet and with the assistance of Liberty, Lucy's young lover, bring nothing but alpine references and hallucinogenic experiences for the bewildered Toby. In an effort to save Iso, who Toby believes has attempted to murder Roehm in a fit of passion, Toby finishes the killing and pursues the fleeing Iso to Switzerland where the answers to his questions about his parentage and about Roehm come not from the living world.
This moody, erotically questioning novel travels in fits and starts with a more satisfying pick up in pace in the final pages. This may be too late for the reader who could be easily frustrated in the pompous self indulgent wanderings of Toby's mind, whose world is truly so narrow that nothing not effecting his immediate existence is completely irrelevant to him. The child wanting to be a man fails to grow throughout the novel and the reader may not really care what happens as an outcome despite many unanswered questions.
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Andrea Thompson
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The book is initially very appealing: the main characters are painted well; the story begins nicely; and my interest was easily held. However, the plot lost momentum in the middle, and petered out at the end. I'm still not sure what some of the plot lines were all about.
There are two sex scenes. The first one is between mother and son. The second one is violent. If this turns you on, then buy the book. I found it pretty unpleasant.
The book also contains one of the tales from Duncker's "Seven Tales of Sex and Death". This tale was nasty.
There are two sex scenes. The first one is between mother and son. The second one is violent. If this turns you on, then buy the book. I found it pretty unpleasant.
The book also contains one of the tales from Duncker's "Seven Tales of Sex and Death". This tale was nasty.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this book simply from the blurb and I was not disappointed! The characters are compelling and likable and the ending is shocking. The seemingly normal beginning of everyday events quickly draw you into the characters bizarre lives and from there the story quickly begins to unfold. You cannot fail to love this book and the characters and the story stay with you even after you have put the book down. You must read this book!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Subversive, scary and compelling
Yet again I find myself amazed by her insight into the dark sides of human behaviour, by the power of her storytelling, and by the things she can tell you about the nature of... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Monique Aj Smith
Sensuously, decadently delicious, with a shocking mystery at its heart
I am still not really sure what I think of this book - it is quite different from her others and has a disturbing quality that is seductive and repellent by turns. Read more
Published on 5 Oct 2009 by Eileen Shaw
Brain damage warning, beep.. beep.. beep..
I wasn't going to bother, but I feel I owe it to humanity to warn you off this piece of foolishness. Read more
Published on 14 Jan 2009 by Gargantua Pantaloon
Fantastic
I'm only half-way into the book at the moment so dare say I shouldn't be reviewing it yet but I just can't wait. Read more
Published on 6 Jun 2004
Literary Vivid and Accessible Page Turner
this is a great book. very well written, pacey but deep. Treads the boundary between the real and the imaginary with great skill and control. Read more
Published on 1 July 2002 by Mel stride
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