The Deadly Space Between
Reissued
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Toby Hawk is a solitary boy in a family of Amazons. His mother, only
fifteen years older than him, is a painter on the brink of commercial
success. His great-aunt is a wealthy textile designer; her partner,
Liberty, a barrister. Meanwhile, eighteen-year-old Toby's world remains a
small, closed round of school, domesticity and surfing the Net at
night. But everything changes when his mother takes up with a
fascinating but enigmatic scientist, Roehm. Patricia Duncker's gripping
novel is a disturbing tale of Oedipal passion. It is also an eerie
psychological ghost story in the European tradition, whose sources -
Freud, Faust and Frankenstein - haunt the pages.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Her literary reputation well established with Hallucinating Foucault and The Doctor, Duncker here draws on Mary Shelley, Herman Melville and Freud, yet the work is powerfully her own, erotically charged and, finally, enigmatic. Most of this provocative novel is narrated by London-bred Tobias, the 18-year-old son of Iso, an unmarried girl who gave birth to him before she was 16. She has never identified his father, and perhaps not unconsciously encourages him to be infatuated with her, even allowing him certain sexual freedoms. Iso is fascinated by a huge man, identified only as Roehm, 25 years her senior; he is physically overwhelming and intuitively aware of her feelings and movements. Tobias, no less than his mother, develops a near-sexual relationship with him. When Tobias discovers that Roehm is actually his father, the Oedipal nature of this strange m nage trois is evident. In Melville's words, they have transgressed "the deadly space between." Tobias finally tries to kill Roehm, but is unsuccessful, and after he and Iso flee to the glacier-covered mountains of Switzerland (corresponding to Shelley's Arctic ice floes), Roehm follows. His body is soon discovered in a crevasse near their retreat. When Iso goes to the police to confess to having killed him, they laugh. They have examined the body, they say; it is two centuries old and has been identified as one "Gustave Roehm, a Swiss alpinist." Mother and son depart, but find they are still not entirely free of Roehm. The major source Duncker fails to acknowledge is Henry James, and if her contemporary ghost story lacks the exquisite subtlety of The Turn of the Screw, it captures the imagination, grotesquely repellant yet sinuously compelling.
