David Llewellyn reviews Neil Bartlett's Skin Lane

London: The sweltering summer of ’67. The Beatles have just released ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, Jimi Hendrix is ‘Stone Free’, and Cream are basking in the ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 has legalised homosexual acts for those aged 21 and over. The city was a swinging, psychedelic playground of youthful excess.
Or was it?
Neil Bartlett’s Costa-nominated ‘Skin Lane’ (Serpents Tail, £10.99) takes us to the heart of the nation’s capital in that hot and sticky summer, and introduces us to a character whose life is anything but swinging.
Mr F (short for Freeman) is head cutter at Scheiner’s furriers on the seemingly ancient Skin Lane, a part of the City devoted almost exclusively to the manufacturing of fur coats. He is forty seven years old, obsessively fastidious, never late for work, and unbearably lonely.
With meticulous (but never tedious) attention to the minutiae of Mr F’s humdrum life, Bartlett crafts a story of obsession and unrequited love that is often heart-stopping. When Mr F is given the task of training a beautiful new apprentice (the boss’s nephew), his well-ordered, precision-made world is sent spiralling into a terminal nose-dive. Mr F is neither a formally educated nor an articulate man. How does this character, who has devoted thirty three years of his life to the cutting of furs and little else, respond to his illicit and barely talked-about desires?
It is in this last respect that Mr F is a truly amazing creation. Books are, more often than not, populated by incredibly articulate characters who are fond of voicing their emotions, either externally or internally, thus giving the author a nice, easy ride. It is a brave author who decides to render his protagonist practically mute with shame, and virtually incapable of self-analysis. Mr F is no anachronism; he is a blue collar man born in 1920 with no reading or proper schooling to speak of. He may have heard of Oscar Wilde, but it’s unlikely he’d know what he was famous for, and the dimly lit torsos in the National Gallery are as perplexing to him as the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone.
Mr F is a stranger in a strange land, a man uncomfortable in his own skin (no pun intended), being forced by circumstances beyond his control into a world of change and liberation. Twelve months before the streets of Paris will erupt with student protests, the dark and sinister alleyways of Mr F’s heart are enjoying a revolution of their own.
If Mr F is a magnetic and endlessly fascinating protagonist, then the novel’s chief supporting character, the city itself, is no less beautifully drawn. Not since Peter Ackroyd’s spellbinding biography of London has the metropolis been so lovingly and painstakingly recreated on the page. To follow Mr F through the cobbled streets of a city still scarred by war is to feel as if you have been there in person; Bartlett is a tirelessly enthusiastic tour guide.
It is this ebullient narrative voice, forever inviting the reader that little bit closer, that gives the novel its heart. With its setting and protagonist, Skin Lane could have been a hopelessly bleak work, and one which leaves the reader cold, but fortunately our omniscient narrator is a friendly (if occasionally macabre) voice in the shadows. There is an old-fashioned showmanship to Bartlett’s writing which is missing from much contemporary fiction, and Skin Lane is all the stronger for it. There are passages (particularly towards the end) when his skill at building tension is reminiscent of Dostoevsky, and I don’t go chucking a statement like that around willy-nilly. Witness Mr F counting his young apprentice’s steps up the wooden staircase, and try not to think of Raskolnikov’s progress across St Petersberg.
If I have just one minor reservation about the book, it is that once or twice the footnotes from history that are woven into the narrative interrupt the flow a little jarringly. I appreciate that the story is set in 1967, that this year is a landmark in gay history, and that this juxtaposes nicely with Mr F’s button-down-collared repression. I don’t necessarily need the narrator to signpost it in such big letters. That said, this is an issue of very little consequence. Skin Lane is a hypnotic and compulsive book, as mesmerising as the beauty of Mr F’s apprentice, and as lovingly crafted as a mink coat.

- David Llewellyn.

Skin Lane is published by Serpent's Tale.

Read Neil Bartlett's Author Profile <here>

David Llewellyn's novel: Eleven was published by Seren in 2007.

Read David Llewellyn's Author Profile <here>


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