The Electric Michelangelo [Paperback]

Both the setting and Cy's profession give Hall an opportunity to linger at the frailty of our bodies and our souls, something she does with a great deal of compassion. Even so, she seems to relish the decline of bodies and of places: it's all dying consumptives, alcoholics, the glamour of the sea-side slipping away. At times, she includes bursts of violence that shock by the extent of their viciousness. The subterranean art of tattoos stands for some deeper struggle, the book suggests; it's part of how we face the world and ourselves.

The first pages of The Electric Michelangelo blew me away. It's written in an astonishing restless, easy flow that reminds me of Zadie Smith at her best, though with less humour and more poetry.

A couple of chapters later, I was falling out of love with the book. Perhaps it was the dearth of dialogue or storytelling drive that was starting to take its toll. A lot is going on - there are illegal abortions, near-death in the quick sands of Morecambe Bay, electrocuted elephants - but somehow these dramatic events are so embedded in descriptions that they seem more of an afterthought than the backbone of the novel. And be honest, when you skip something as you read along, is it dialogue or is it descriptions?

That is not to say that these passages lack originality or beauty. There are many unexpected metaphors to savour, but their impact is lessened by the sheer wordiness of it all. Every single thing is the subject of so much symbolism that the style grows too laboured, in spite of all its bawdy irreverence. Shouldn't good writers work like magicians and conceal their tricks from the world? And shouldn't good writing be easy to read, not make you feel as though you're swimming through jelly?

Suddenly I was reminded of Stella Gibbon's parody "Cold Comfort Farm", where she takes the mickey out of over-literary writers, and once I had seen the book through those goggles, I just couldn't shake it off. After all, sometimes a tattoo is just a tattoo.

The key to the book, in my opinion, is William Blake. It is a Song of Experience. It deals with many different unpalatable aspects of life. In Morecambe it is the coughing consumptives who visit his mother's hotel, the back street abortions and the brutal way in which Riley has his hands smashed, which eventually lead to his death. In Coney Island it is the death of an elephant, the maiming of Grace and the subsequent revenge imposed on Malcolm Sedak. All this with the backdrop of the brutality of two world wars. The contrast to this though is always the art of the tattooist and the innocence of Cy himself.

There are two explicit references to Blake in the book. The first is when Cy's art lessons from Riley are described:
'And there was Blake with his mutative, folded-together mind and his temporal visions and his careful illustrations of heaven and hell, of tigers and lambs, the opposing hemispheres of humans.'
It is the opposing hemispheres of humans which can be found in Morecambe and, more particularly, in Coney Island, a freak show on the edge of such a brave new world.

The second reference is the lines of Blake's poem which are discovered on the sole of Riley's right foot by Cy after his death:
'Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame they fearful symmetry?'
Riley, and later Grace, appear to have been forged in a different place and beg the question Did he who made the lamb make thee? Cy is entranced by both of them. He is the innocent, the lamb. After falling in love with Grace, and then completely misunderstanding her motives, he eventually finds himself in a tender moment with her.
'Then, as always, in the opposingly hemisphered life of Cyril parks, with beauty arrived its disagreeable, diametric partner.'
They are interrupted by a disgruntled customer and the moment is lost.

The final part of the book sees Cy back in Morecambe watching the slow decline of the seaside town during the fifties and sixties. Eventually in 1972 Nina Shearer, the grandchild of a Morecambe bathing beauty whom Cy had fantasised over in his teens, appears on the scene. She is a punk who is heavily into body piercing and who wants to learn the art of tattooing, just as Cy had done. This is a nice touch to complete the book, though from my recollections body piercing did not start to become popular until later in the decade and only in recent years has it become mainstream along with the tattoo. Punk, in its original manifestation would fit nicely into Hall's description of Coney Island. However, the tattooist's world has surely now been anaesthetised as the tattoo has become a fashion statement, rather than the 'personal socialism' of Eliot Riley.