The Book of Revelation - Rupert Thomson

I'd never heard of Rupert Thomson before this book; I stumbled across it in the library and was impressed by the reviews on the cover. The Times, Observer, Guardian, Express, Independent, Mail, Telegraph and others all had complimentary things to say. After sampling a few pages, I realised the main subject is the kidnapping and sexual torture of a man, by three women. Hmm. Was this a strange 'underground' book, notorious rather than interesting, enjoyable reading? I tried Jean Genet many years ago, and it revolted me.

Reader, fear not. The central part of the book is indeed the above scenario, but this is not pornographic reading. On a spring day in Amsterdam, a dancer goes out to buy cigarettes for his girlfriend. He is talented and successful, and his abduction by the three women is disturbing, surreal, and, yes, sometimes erotic reading. He is chained, raped, mutilated and humiliated. It's considerably less obvious and more complex than a political reversal of gender exploitation. The climactic moment is when his masked captors force him to choreograph a ballet and perform it, chained and naked, in front of an invited audience:

He would have to improvise, of course. Many of the steps would be impossible, given the restrictions he would be working under…What an unusual Swan Lake it was going to be - a version that had never been seen before, and would never be seen again. A special performance, one night only. Swan Lake In Chains …The real beauty of this new Swan Lake…was its sub-text: he would be using the ballet both to expose and ridicule the whole idea of the women's love for him, which was not a tribute or a celebration, whatever they might say, but an entirely destructive force (94 5).

He is doubly confined - not only imprisoned but also chained - and, paradoxically, these constraints facilitate greater creativity. Thomson suggests that confinement is the fundamental tool of art, without which the drive to question consciousness does not exist.

We read about the narrators fears and his internal struggles. His captors have different personalities - aggressive and sexually predatory, meek and apologetic etc. - and he gives them different names, which gives him some psychological power. Ironically, we never learn his own name - which emphasises his dehumanisation. Finally he is released, and dumped in an anonymous and unfamiliar part of Amsterdam.

The rest of the story documents his difficulty returning to normal life after this trauma, beginning with his return to his girlfriend. This is a weak part of the book - she is hurt and angry that he left her and made a fool of her. No one could be that insensitive, not to recognise the atmosphere that surrounds him after his ordeal. However, we are asked to believe that their reunion is interpreted only in her terms, not his. When he shows her his scars, she is convinced he has been "some kind of affair, some perverted liaison" (122). He cannot articulate the horror of what he has experienced, because she does not believe him: "What about me? I wanted to cry out. How do you think I feel? Somehow, I couldn't, though" (122). He concludes: "I think that what we talked about that night was irrelevant. What mattered was the absence itself. I had left her once, I could leave her again. She could no longer count on me." (123). He does not have the strength to challenge her, and only he is capable of providing comfort and support; she cannot give it to him when his own need is far greater.

Their relationship does not survive, he inherits some money, and goes off travelling around the world. In a sexual encounter with a French girl, he begins to hallucinate, seeing the white walls where he was imprisoned. He notes that "It was one of the ironies of my new existence that, despite my absolute and unprecedented freedom, I was more self-contained, more sealed off, than I had ever been before. I became a mystery to others" (157). Traumatised, aimless and with "a peculiar, almost eerie sense of quiet", he notes that "the people who passed me on the street…would see a man talking to himself, making a desperate attempt to hold himself together" (158).

After a few years he returns to Amsterdam and begins an obsessive quest to find his captors, by having sex with large numbers of women and surveying their bodies for recognisable anatomy. One of the women he sleeps with tells him that she was abused by her father but that no one had ever believed her. It suddenly occurs to him that "there were others like me, people who were operating in a fourth dimension, a world that was parallel to this one, a kind of purgatory" (186). He feels he has become "monstrous", exactly like his tormentors.

Eventually he finds a new girlfriend, and two older friends help him. One of them encourages him to leave the past behind and start to choreograph again: "she insisted that I could use dance to exorcise the things that were troubling me" (201). She tells him a story which is a metaphor for his own healing, the theme for a possible ballet, and he begins to work on a production. He is like a missile on a damaged psychological trajectory, that will eventually fall to the ground and explode. He sees someone in a club, convinced she is one of the three women, assaults her, and is arrested for attempted rape. Past events have set him apart from others and he cannot explain his actions: he cannot relate to other people when he has experienced events that defy rationality, explanation or resolution. They will not believe him. Alone in his cell, he is subject to Kafka-esque, psychological confinement, questioned by a variety of people so he feels Events were speeding up in a way that seemed both orchestrated and vertiginous. People appeared and disappeared in front of me with dizzying rapidity, and I was supposed to impress each one of them. I found that I could hardly catch my breath - and this, oddly, despite long periods in the cell, alone. I was being asked o assume full responsibility for my past actions, and yet, at the same time, I seemed to have forfeited all control over the present (257).

The novel has an inconclusive outcome: he asks to telephone a policeman he met at a party, who he feels might be sympathetic, and begins, for the first time, to recount his story. Thomson writes in a calm, unnerving style, distancing the reader from the traumatic events by switching from first to third person narrative. This both complicates and deepens the structure the book. It suggests a questioning of and reference to literary tropes of confinement and abuse, and it directs the reader to reflect on the psychological distancing associated with trauma.

The Book of Revelation is a surreal, psycho-sexual study which shows the indeterminate, isolating, and enduring damage which is the legacy of dehumanising trauma. His only hope is to tell his story, and hope it will be believed.

How have women readers responded to the novel's reversal of gender roles or its placing of women in the positions of sexual power and the man as the object of their pleasure and humiliation? - - -Interview with Rupert Thomson