In the White Room

By Paul Gray

Rupert Thomson's five novels have earned him the status of a cult figure, at least in the British press, but the London-based author, 44, now seems to be bidding for a somewhat more remunerative title, as in "best seller." Thomson's sixth novel, The Book of Revelation (Knopf; 260 pages; $23), ought to widen considerably the circle of his readership on both sides of the Atlantic. His new book, like its predecessors, conveys bizarre, surrealistic events with understated, laconic precision, but the principal subject this time out is that fail-safe crowd pleaser, kinky sex.

Thomson's unnamed protagonist is a dancer, 29, with a ballet company in Amsterdam. He is, at the outset, a happy man. His well-regarded initial efforts as a choreographer allow him to look forward to a satisfying career when his performing days come to an end. He remains in love with Brigitte, a fellow dancer with whom he has lived and to whom he has stayed faithful for seven years. When she asks him to go out and buy her a pack of cigarettes, he teases her about smoking too much but walks willingly into the spring sunshine.

Three women wearing curious hoods approach him in a deserted alleyway--fans, he guesses--and the next thing he knows he is chained hands and feet to the floor of a stark white room with only a skylight in the high ceiling to remind him of the outside world. "You belong to us," one of the women tells him. "You're ours now."

The ordeal that follows unfolds like a gender-bending version of The Story of O. Helplessly, the dancer must submit to his captors' sexual demands and to an excruciating but not disabling form of mutilation. His body is made the centerpiece of a pornographic banquet; he is forced to dance, chained and naked, before an invited audience of masked guests. The women, faces always hidden, refuse his pleas for an explanation of why they are doing this.

Suddenly, they set him free. He has been held, he learns, for 18 days, and he finds he cannot resume his interrupted life. Brigitte is angry at his absence and accuses him of running off for a fling with another woman. When he tries to tell her the truth and shows her his scars as proof, he only confirms her suspicions. But who could be expected to believe his story or grasp his feelings of violation and shame? When he happens to meet a police officer who investigates unsolved crimes, he recounts his experience as if it had happened to a friend of his: "Olsen was silent for a moment, and then he laughed and said, 'That's terrible.'"

It is possible to draw several morals from The Book of Revelation: that the equation of sex with power is evil, that the sadistic torture of a male can seem shocking to those who take the similar treatment of females in erotic literature for granted. But such readings seem crimped and reductive in the presence of Thomson's spellbinding narrative. To share his protagonist's search for the meaning of his captivity is to embark on a chillingly haunted quest.

--By Paul Gray