The Book Tower

4/5

Picture London in 1967, although I’d like you to put the obvious images out of your mind. I want you to forget about The Beatles tucked away inside Abbey Road and recording Sgt. Pepper. Also forget about Carnaby Street and Emma Peel in The Avengers, and don’t think of Michael Caine and Terence Stamp eascaping their working class roots to live film star lives. Instead imagine the drab end of the period; a city where war is still a very vivid memory, where employment more commonly meant a job for life, where a television set was a luxury rather than a necessity, and where an individual could quite easily go through their life with a suit based upon a 1938 cut. Mr F, the central character of Neil Bartlett’s novel, lives very much in this monochrome, and perhaps more realistic, version of the 1960s. For him, the colourful remain elite; the privileged few who grace the magazine covers that flit before him on his daily commute on the underground. Travelling dutifully to work as a furrier in a warehouse specialising in animal furs in Skin Lane, Mr F is the central character of a very intriguing book.

Bartlett manages to successfully weave the different styles of credible journalism, fairy tale narrative and potential murder story into his fiction, although there’s really no need to dissect his style; this novel is just effectively creepy. Wonderfully creepy. One of the reasons for this is that he doesn’t hurry things and the story unfolds very carefully and deliberately; it’s very difficult to tell where this novel is going. The solitary Mr F inhabits our drab sixties world, plagued by his unconsummated homosexuality. When a young man falls under his wing as a new apprentice F begins to fantasise about him, his imagination soon brought into line when the youth blackmails him into paying for his girlfriend’s abortion. We soon realise that Bartlett chose this moment in British history for a reason – 1967 is also famous both for the coldly titled sexual offences act, which decriminalised homosexuality in the UK and for the Abortion Act. But although written from a 2007 viewpoint the narrative avoids being knowingly intrusive. Bartlett ponders over a small archive of faded photographs, papers and forgotten place names to set his scene but doesn’t go overboard in reimagining the past. There’s no sentimentality for the 1960s – and Bartlett is keen to remind us that many of the areas of London he recreates in the novel are now gone. Bulldozed or burnt down, Mr F’s world has since been paved over and rebuilt afresh.

Nicknamed Beauty by his co-workers, the young man represents the fairy tale aspect of Skin Lane, such tales which ravished the imagination of Mr F as a child. And an old and forgotten book of fairy tales makes a final and moving reappearance on the closing page – but Bartlett reminds us that reality is not so clean cut as the fairy tale. Skin Lane tantalises the reader with talk of knives and the precision required to use them with skill, and also the dangers they possess if used carelessly (one of the best parts of the novel is when the preoccupied Mr F slips and badly cuts his hand – you live and feel his discomfort). But don’t be fooled by the quote on the cover of this book – Skin Lane is far from the psycho shocker it’s being advertised as. Bartlett does brilliantly lead the reader into an enclosed space for a chilling final confrontation, although it doesn’t fall into the realm of slasher fiction, and he goes on to soberly add some final chapters to bring the lives of his characters to a natural and realistic conclusion. This is an assured and well structured novel, that isn’t afraid to cast the rose tinted image of the 1960s as the stuff of dreams.