THE DEADLY SPACE BETWEEN

Duncker (The Doctor, 2000) returns with an elegantly written, ultimately silly modern gothic featuring incest, sexual ambiguity, sadomasochism, and evil personified.

Toby Hawk, 18, never knew his father and has lived isolated in the English suburbs with his mother, Isobel, a successful painter, in an intense relationship that sometimes crosses the line into incest. When Isobel takes a mysterious lover, Toby’s jealousy turns to obsession with the man, and after he meets Roehm (one name only), he experiences sexual desire for him as well. Roehm’s hands and breath are icy, the animals in his laboratory exhibit terror at his approach, he knows people’s secrets and is able to manipulate computers as if by magic, even pulling Toby onto a virtual glacier. Who is he? Toby’s father? An ex-Nazi? A Swiss botanist who died in 1786? Toby’s great-aunt Luce has never met Roehm but fears he will kill Isobel. Luce’s lesbian lover, a barrister, discovers that there’s no record of Roehm’s existence. Toby witnesses the primal scene between his mother and Roehm and enacts but fails to consummate the Oedipal acts of intercourse with her and murder of him. Duncker underlines the seriousness of her intent with references to Faust, Roland Barthes (on “Death of the Father”) and passages from Frankenstein, whether as homage to Mary Shelley or to emphasize that this novel, too, deals with perverse fatherhood. Among unexplained mysteries for the reader are why Duncker chooses to include excessively lengthy excerpts from Toby’s on-line research, as well as descriptions of Windows icons and familiar objects such as slot machines: Are these meant to create an effect of estrangement or did they merely need to be edited?

Overwrought in content, gracefully subdued in tone: an entertainment that falls short of its apparently lofty goals.