The Electric Michelangelo [Paperback]

The Electric Michelangelo is the story and philosophies of Cy Parks, and both are well presented and very interesting.
Hall's characters are not exactly likeable, with the exception of Cy, but they are well constructed, entirely believable and she makes us feel a degree of symapthy for them, even Eliot Riley. Trawling through a life can be tedious at times, but Hall manages to engage her readers' attention throughout, and I was sorry when it finished. The ending was well done, and somehow entirely appropriate to the rest of the novel. There was not the selling out of the characters for a 'happy' ending as often happens in novels.
I think it is a crying shame that this did not win last year's Booker prize, because it stands head and shoulders above the rest of the short-list.

I enjoyed How to Paint a Dead Man and Haweswater so much I looked forward to reading this book. As with all her books It is well researched and Sarah Hall is a great writer but this book was a bit long, dark and in my view not as enjoyable as her others. I really enjoyed the first part then it got heavy and I found it dull and slow. I am not surprised that it was short listed for the Man booker it's just the sort of complicated, heavy to read and requires a lot of work by the reader. I am glad I finished it and I now know quite a bit about the tatooing. Don't read it on holiday its a wade rather than a paddle! The Electric Michelangelo

"The Electric Michelangelo" is a view of the world as seen by Cy Parks, a natural loner and deep thinker, following him through childhood and adolescence in the seaside resort of Morecambe helping his stoic yet quietly rebellious mother run a unique B&B/invalid rest home hybrid business, and meets an eccentric tattoo artist who takes him roughly under his wing and introduces him to the trade.

Cy then takes us to the underworld of Coney Island, another seaside resort, very different and yet with surprising similarities to his native Morecambe.

Cy is a fascinating character and Hall invokes the atmosphere of his surroundings in both Morecambe and Coney Island with astonishing detail and a keenly observational eye, really bringing the spirit of each place alive, with the conflict between what the resorts need to provide to stay alive and what it does to the soul of the place beautifully explored.

Sadly, Cy's own character is not quite as deeply explored. He's an endlessly fascinating character but it is almost as if Hall is so in love with her own creation that she guards him rather jealously - for a story using tattooing as a metaphor for what people feel under their skin, we're not really allowed to get under Cy's - we feel his pain, but we are never allowed to truly explore it and the motives behind it - Cy teases out the feelings of others but Hall never allowed us to see the motives behind his own actions.

I felt at the end of the novel I understood Morecambe and Coney Island better than I understood what really made Cy tick, which is a shame as he's a fascinating character, but left too much as an enigma and the vague, inconclusive ending and sudden leap from his leaving Coney Island to his last days in Morecambe, with only vague hints at what happened to Cy in between, is frustrating in a novel so rich in detail for the periods it does describe.

Hall is good at invoking atmosphere but is sometimes a little too indulgent in her language, with brief bouts of very wordy and somewhat leaden prose where I found myself skipping over a few paragraphs to get back to the actual plot.

She does also have a slightly adolescent fondness for unnecessary sexual metaphor which does sometimes seem little more than an attempt to shock - if ever a female author could give credibility to the theory of penis envy I suspect Hall might, as the metaphorical phallus really does make an appearance more often than even this gay male mind found entirely necessary!

Still, this is a beautifully written if ultimately frustrating book - if Hall were as generous in letting us under the skin of her hero as she was in exploring the nature of the resorts, you'd have an incredible book. As it is, a well-written, astonishing book which falls just short of excellence.