MAKING HATE

A familiar literary question: how far can stylishly lively, textured British writing go toward making a weak or tawdry story seem upper-class? This example of that paradox is really two such stories intertwined: the tawdry one is a series of rapes committed by a psycho wearing a monkey mask (his italicized thoughts explain, sort of, his woman-hating, monkey-loving hangups); the weak one is the saga of nice, short Simon, a Scene of Crime Officer (civilian clerk-detective) who's dealing with being a divorced Sunday father, with looking for female companionship again. Since two of Simon's dates are among the rape victims, he worries about maybe being a dual personality--and the stories are linked, but not with ease or conviction. Perhaps if Wilson can get out of the psychosexual rut (the essence of her earlier books too), she'll start applying her engaging manner to more coherent, less artificially melodramatic matters.