Deadly Space Between - Softcover

Patricia Duncker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408812177 ISBN 13: 9781408812174

Publisher: Bloomsbury UK, 2011

Synopsis

Book by Duncker, Patricia

About this title

About the Author

Patricia Duncker is the author of four previous novels: Hallucinating Foucault (winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize in 1996), The Deadly Space Between, James Miranda Barry and Miss Webster and Cherif (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2007). She has written two books of short fiction, Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees (shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1997) and Seven Tales of Sex and Death, and a collection of essays on writing and contemporary literature, Writing on the Wall. She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester. Her most recent novel, The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge, has been shortlisted for the Best Crime Novel of the Year (CWA Gold Dagger).

From Publishers Weekly

Her literary reputation well established with Hallucinating Foucault and The Doctor, Duncker here draws on Mary Shelley, Herman Melville and Freud, yet the work is powerfully her own, erotically charged and, finally, enigmatic. Most of this provocative novel is narrated by London-bred Tobias, the 18-year-old son of Iso, an unmarried girl who gave birth to him before she was 16. She has never identified his father, and perhaps not unconsciously encourages him to be infatuated with her, even allowing him certain sexual freedoms. Iso is fascinated by a huge man, identified only as Roehm, 25 years her senior; he is physically overwhelming and intuitively aware of her feelings and movements. Tobias, no less than his mother, develops a near-sexual relationship with him. When Tobias discovers that Roehm is actually his father, the Oedipal nature of this strange menage a trois is evident. In Melville's words, they have transgressed the deadly space between. Tobias finally tries to kill Roehm, but is unsuccessful, and after he and Iso flee to the glacier-covered mountains of Switzerland (corresponding to Shelley's Arctic ice floes), Roehm follows. His body is soon discovered in a crevasse near their retreat. When Iso goes to the police to confess to having killed him, they laugh. They have examined the body, they say; it is two centuries old and has been identified as one Gustave Roehm, a Swiss alpinist. Mother and son depart, but find they are still not entirely free of Roehm. The major source Duncker fails to acknowledge is Henry James, and if her contemporary ghost story lacks the exquisite subtlety of The Turn of the Screw, it captures the imagination, grotesquely repellant yet sinuously compelling.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1408812177
• ISBN 13: 9781408812174
• Binding: Paperback