PUSSY'S BOW

Cheeky homoerotic novel set in Melbourne that will appeal mainly to readers who delight in the joys of sodomy, by the author of Glove Puppet (1998), an Aussie novel about a 20-year-old porn star who for years has been sleeping with his gay stepfather. Drinnan’s tone has dimmed down from the torturedly golden rhetoric of Glove Puppet and has been given over to the setting itself. The novel takes place largely in turreted Juliette, a smashing Art Deco mansion with English leadlight windows and is set in the Poet’s Corner, where all the streets are named after dead English novelists and Romantic poets. Master of the manse is Doc, a Catholic doctor, who lives with Dixon Brearly, writer of a garden/lifestyle column for the Toorak Courier, and with a Vietnamese painter named D—ng. Doc is being blackmailed by Ricky Drouin, a junkie from hell. Meanwhile, deciding to hire a live-in cook and housekeeper, the trio takes on wide-eyed young Murray Fox (formerly Shane Hutton), who has just arrived in Melbourne, been raped, and may have AIDS. Next door to Juliette lives Claudette with her cat Missy: pussy’s bow, the novel’s title, is an Australian idiom that means something like “I’ve had it up to here”—the neck, that is, where a pussy’s bow is tied. The title is as well a play on Murray’s breaking his neck. The story turns on the disposal of the body of a gay basher who attacks D—ng and whom the three kill by misadventure, then have to bury, and then have to invent a cover story for when the dead kid’s pregnant girlfriend shows up looking for him. Meanwhile, Claudette has eyes for Murray. As before, one for the boys, although lighter in tone and far less grim.