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THE BOOK OF REVELATION by Rupert Thomson

THE BOOK OF REVELATION

by Rupert Thomson

Pub Date: Feb. 9th, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40927-0
Publisher: Knopf

The British author who in such accomplished books as The Five Gates of Hell (1991) and Soft! (1998) has perfected the kind of noir thriller Graham Greene used to write now outdoes himself with this absorbing tale of captivity and obsession. Thomson’s protagonist is a nameless Englishman who has found fame and fulfillment in Amsterdam as a dancer and choreographer, and who is the lover of his beautiful partner Brigitte. Leaving their apartment one evening on an errand, he is met by “three figures in hoods and cloaks”—women admirers, it seems. But the three drug and kidnap him, chaining him to the floor of an almost empty room (whose only furnishings, oddly enough, are a washer and dryer) where he is kept naked, sexually used, subjected to genital mutilation, forced to perform a ballet of his own choosing before an audience of unidentified spectators, then released after 18 days. Though Thomson never explains his experience, symbolic reasons suggest themselves when the dancer begins “to feel as if his fate was no more or less than he deserved,” and it is suggested that his (usually masked) captors— domination of him dramatizes “the damage that had once been done to them now finding expression in clandestine rituals, barbarity, a pursuit of the bizarre.” The nature of his subsequent “freedom” is equally cryptic. The end of his relationship with Brigitte (to whom he cannot tell his story), an unexpected legacy that enables him to travel widely, his surrender to compulsive promiscuity, and a rash act that can only be interpreted as attempted rape—all are ironically logical outgrowths of his desire to find the women who altered his life and to understand the person he has become (or has perhaps, without realizing so, always been). The psychodrama Thomson builds from these fascinating particulars is an ineffably disturbing “revelation” of the possibilities and dangers we unknowingly carry within ourselves. One of the most eerily original novels of recent years. Thomson’s masterpiece.