Status
Call number
Genres
Publication
Description
In a room in Soho, a man is turning gold. His flesh, his organs, even his beautiful eyes, are being transformed by some shocking human alchemy into precious deadly metal. And the path to this curious and frightening predicament has itself been filled with incredible moments. It began on South Ronaldsay amongst the singing seals and ancient ruins of Orkney. There a lad grew up with a rare gift for loving - something that proved much trickier than it sounds. He encountered misunderstanding, bullying, loss and hearbreak. And yet the physical heights he reached - and to which he brought others - went far beyond any normal sensual pleasure. This led to the sort of sex that made people see angels. Indeed when the lad actually lost his virginity, it was to a glorious Dane called Engel who fell - literally - out of the sky, entangled in a huge kite tail. Luke Sutherland's modern-day myth about the power of love veers from stratosphere to gutter, from visions of heaven to the all-too-mortal yearning below for even just one glimpse of it. Shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Prize for his first novel, Jellyroll, Sutherland has already hit a literary emotional nerve with the readers, who can only be captivated by this strange and wonderful creation.… (more)
User reviews
Faithfully recorded by the text's author "L.S.", Venus as a Boy is posited as the faithful transcript - "a memorial of sorts" - of a series of autobiographical recordings made by the novel's hero/ heroine, Desirée. "L.S." and Desirée share the same Orcadian roots and the experience of being miss-fits within a closed island community where ethnic and gendered identities are predicated on long and isolated traditions. Desirée learns very quickly that survival in this environment depends on the ability to assume identities, to make and break alliances, whilst retaining any sense of "true" identity within oneself. Whether this is manifested in wearing girl's panties under outwardly male attire, or by keeping close company with the local bully in order to gain respect amongst one's peers, it is clear from this novel - were there any remaining doubt - that identity is politics.
Desirée's destiny is changed forever by the discovery of a peculiar penchant for sex, as much metaphysical as physical - and the instilling of a spiritual and vocational sense of purpose which ultimately leads her to a transgender brothel in Soho, the heart of London's sex industry. Her experiences there, at the hands of an Eastern European immigrant pimp, bring about a transformation which fuses her physical being to her perceived spiritual calling. The layers of her outer self begin to peel away to reveal, perhaps, the value and worth of her inner self.
There is little obvious optimism in this novel, at least in terms of the here and now. Neither, however, is there a true spirit of tragedy; redemption is possible, as are happiness, peace and true love. Form must serve function, however, and the fluid and multiple identities that we occupy and switch between deny us the holism required for comfort in who we really are. Finding ourselves, under all the layers of carnival and masquerade, is almost impossible within society and culture: life as we know it.