Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
A Glasgow antiques dealer finds horrible pictures in a dead man's house, in this captivating thriller from a new Scottish writer.
Apr 8, 2003 | In her debut novel, "The Cutting Room," Scottish writer Louise Welsh tackles a very nasty subject without provoking a trace of moral queasiness in the reader. Welsh's subject is snuff porn, one that has been used for both moralistic condemnations of the sex trade and, in the guise of moralism, to provide readers with a sick turn-on. It's to Welsh's credit that she never once lingers on the subject pruriently. She never uses it to excite us.
In recent books, writers like Stephen King and Val McDermid have been addressing the question of where novelists and readers become culpable in the suffering of victims. Welsh can hold her head up. There isn't a moment in "The Cutting Room" where she crosses that line.
"The Cutting Room" is being sold as a thriller and, technically, it is. I hesitate to describe it that way, for fear that some readers, wary of a genre exercise, will pass it by. But I also realize that hesitation might seem like a backhanded slap at the fine writing being done in crime fiction. To say that the book is more than a thriller, and that Welsh is more interested in character and in the sharpness of observation than in genre convention, is to imply that all crime fiction sacrifices character and observation to plotting. Rather, what makes Welsh different is that the urgency and motion of the plot come more from the way her hero is pursued by his own conscience than by any outside forces.
In "The Cutting Room," the hero is Rilke (make of the name what you will). He's in his early 40s, and he's a gay auctioneer for one of Glasgow, Scotland's perennial but less salubrious auction houses. (For American readers, even the company's name, Bowery Auctions, denotes a certain seediness.) "My apprenticeship had been served in an atmosphere of regret," Rilke says. "The regret of my elders at the passing of 'the good stuff,' the Georgian silver, treasures and spoils of empire that according to CP had littered the staterooms of his day. I'd rolled my eyes and cursed him for an old man. Now I mourned junk-shop Victoriana and art-deco bibelots. I missed the street hawkers and book barrows of Paddy's Market's prime, shook my head at what passed for quality, and pitied youth. The best was not yet to come. It had vanished for ever."
Welsh's description of the inside of Bowery Auctions, floors of closely packed detritus that will never travel beyond its present storage, is a grander version of a Dickensian hovel, like the sinister rag-and-bone shop where the dead Scrooge's belongings are divvied up by charwomen for what they can get. Like the city beyond it, the auction house feels, in Welsh's vision, stifling and musty, a place of utter deadness, and yet crowded with the emanations of ghosts.
One of those ghosts ends up haunting Rilke. Called to the mansion of an elderly spinster whose brother has just died, Rilke finds a trove of the kind of antiques he didn't think existed anymore. Sensing a windfall for his company, he agrees to the old woman's demand that the three-story house be completely cleared in one week, a third of the time it would normally take. She also tells Rilke that her dead brother, a lifelong bachelor, has a private study that she wants Rilke alone to attend to. "I would appreciate your discretion," she says.
What he finds is something that might be expected to cause embarrassment to an old lady: a collection of erotica, including valuable editions of Olympia Press's Traveler's Companion series (the real-life line of books that mixed works like "Naked Lunch" and "Lolita" along with specially commissioned porn, some of it from the likes of Alexander Trocchi). But there's more -- a cache of photographs portraying people (including the dead man) having sex and a series involving a bound young woman who, in the final photographs, is unmistakably dead, her throat cut.
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