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The Deadly Space Between
 
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The Deadly Space Between (Hardcover)

by Patricia Duncker (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (22 Mar 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0330490095
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330490092
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,185,036 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #22 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > D > Duncker, Patricia

Product Description

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

Review
The gripping new novel from the award-winning author is a disturbing tale of Oedipal passion and an eerie psychological ghost story.

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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews
5 star:
 (3)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:
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1 star:
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Average Customer Review
3.5 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing reading..., 21 April 2003
By A. J Thompson "voyagersaus" (Western Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.

===
Andrea Thompson

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Literary Vivid and Accessible Page Turner, 1 Jul 2002
By Mel stride (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
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. It also made me laugh out loud in parts which, for me, is a rarity with novels. very strong and disturbing characterisations especially Roehm. PD is not scared of tackling matters sexual and grotesque with tremendous results. one of the best books i've read for a long while.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, 6 Jun 2004
By A Customer
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.
After reading 'Hallucinating Foucault' I was prompted to read 'The Deadly Space Between', simlilarly to that it has the same mature text, eloquent metaphors and beautiful descriptiveness. It is however not as immediate as 'Hallucinating Foucault' and for any reader looking for their first foray into Duncker's work I would recommend this as apposed to 'The Deadly Space Between' to begin with before progressing to.
In various parts of these two novels it is plain to see just how fabulous the author is.
I won't go into detail around the actual plot as it isn't fair to as I haven't actually finished reading it but it is completely captivating (given some patience) and challenging almost.

This is definately recommended.

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