The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall - October 2011

[Clare Bookclub Mod]

Sarah Hall's Haweswater, published less than two years ago, was a remarkable debut; with her second novel, now longlisted for the Orange prize, she confirms her status as one of the most significant and exciting of our younger novelists. Cy Parks, the "electric Michelangelo" of the novel's title, is a tattoo artist, born in the early years of the last century and seduced, when little more than a boy, by the siren song of his demanding profession. As apprentice to Eliot Riley, a foul-mouthed binge-drinker who nevertheless maintains a reputation as one of the finest tattoo artists around, Cy endures pain and humiliation, but emerges with an enhanced sense of vocation and an impressive reputation of his own.

When Riley dies, Cy leaves Morecambe, the resort where he served his apprenticeship, and sails for America. Once there, he gravitates to the surreal world of Coney Island, setting up a booth among the freak-shows and white-knuckle rides and pursuing his vocation with the quiet concentration of a man whose life has become subservient to his art.

And for all his concentration, Cy is not immune to passion. He has had experience of women almost from the beginning of his apprenticeship - clients inflamed by the pricking of the needle and eager for sex by way of finale -though without further entanglement; but his love-affair with Grace, a bareback rider and tightrope walker who enters his life shortly after the outbreak of war, is of a different order. Grace is an immigrant of indeterminate origins, a representative of suffering European womanhood: her body is explicitly characterised as a battleground, and when she weeps "all the sorrow of Europe" seems to flood from her dark eyes. She comes to Cy with the request that he tattoo her body with a single, repeated motif: a black-rimmed green eye.