10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE August 10, 2001

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Abominable tale marks author's noteworthy debut

The Abomination by Paul Golding

Random House Publishers, $26.00 Reviewed by Kaizaad Kotwal

Paul Golding is a novelist from England and his debut novel The Abomination is a mature piece of literature. It is written as a fictionalized memoir of boyhood, a childhood so filled with pain, abandonment, abuse and lost innocence that the story threatens to overwhelm the reader. And yet, Golding's polished style, meticulous prose and complex history allows the story to rise above the cliches of most coming-of-age tales.

The Abomination is an intricately woven chronicle of the bizarre life of Santiago Moore Zamora, a young lad born of a Spanish mother and an English father.

The mother, an exotic beauty of impeccable style, remains throughout the boy's youth, somewhat incapable of those cliches of selfless motherhood. For the most part, she is emotionally distant and maternally inept. The father is no better, with his prudish austerity and his misguided notions of masculinity.

Together, this affluent and interestingly (mis)matched couple could no more raise a child than a cavalier cat could nurture a gullible goldfish in an open bowl.

As a result of this parental pandemonium,

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Santiago, ironically nicknamed Iago, becomes the unwitting ward of a series of nannies, au pairs and sundry servants. No sooner is he able to wipe his own behind than he is shuffled off to boarding schools where surrogate parents, in the forms of headmasters, teachers, religious men and older friends, betray him as much and even more than his own parents.

Iago's life, from childhood to early adulthood, is a nihilistic journey filled with neglectful, mercilessly abusive and narcissistically manipulative individuals.

Told in flashback, from Santiago's older years, adrift in a London that knows no boundaries, this boy's youth is a morass of mistakes, Machiavellian manipulations, and morbid misdeeds.

Santiago's life in London as an adult, free from his parents, away form the abusive walls of boarding schools and cut off from a string of abusers, is still deeply connected to his past. For what was an involuntary succumbing to abuse in youth, becomes a voluntary quest for pain, perversion and pandemonium in adulthood. Unmoored from the dock of youth, Santiago finds himself adrift in an adult's ocean of hedonism, hurt and humiliation.

Golding's writing is replete with linguistic landmines. His use of the English language, its vocabulary and its nuances is ex-

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cellent, as he weaves wordy worlds so artfully that they entrance, ensnare and entangle the reader along the elliptical journey that is Santiago Moore Zamora's labyrinthine life. Golding uses language with the detail and precision that a mosaic master would use tiny pieces of sharp yet luminous tile and glass. The writing has an edge to it and even though his prose is self-evidently aware of its own stylistic maneuverings, not one note ever rings false in his hands.

This is as much a book about a sordid childhood as it is about amazing literary style and linguistic panache. Rarely has a writer ever used the language with such crafty and calculated calisthenics of word play, time shifts and mnemonic machinations in contemporary fiction.

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Golding's has an eye for detail as he takes the recollection of memory to new heights. From the mundane to the monumental, Golding's retelling of events, people and objects is filled with rich illusion and allusion. The book is as much about how we remember as it is about what and why we remember it.

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ination

Paul Golding

The abomination alluded to in the title is not a singular act or a momentous misdeed, rather it is a warped web in which a child's innocence is forever lost, sending him down the desolate path of seditious sexuality, murky morality and annihilating abuse. The abomination here is the way in which social pressures lead certain gay individuals headlong into self-fulfilling prophecies of homosexuality as prurient perversion packed with pedophilia and puerile pleasures of an acrimonious and decaying flesh. And the ultimate abomination is how unabominably we view the way in which individuals and society at large deliberately destroy, devour and decimate those outside the norm.

This book is hard to put down because of Golding's stylistic savvy. The story is equally hard to stomach at times, not because it is so graphically retold, but because in it is so easily recognizable the way in which society preys upon its weakest. We may not be cannibals of the flesh, Golding seems to assert, but we, without any hesitation, cannibalize each other's souls, spirits and selves, so that we may, in our own petty ways, maintain the lynch-mob laws of the jungle. In Golding's world, memory is not so much a luxury as it is a vile aftertaste in the wake of the knowledge of what might have been had innocence, and its ensuing paradise, not been lost.

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