James Cahill’s hotly tipped debut about art, privilege and power takes us first to the rarefied environs of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. It’s 1994 and winds of change are blasting through the university. An installation entitled Sick Bed – very much modelled on Tracey Emin’s groundbreaking My Bed – has been erected on the quadrangle. Sick Bed is “an iron frame packed with coil springs … propped up at one end by a mound of empty liquor bottles, crushed beer cans and snarled up clothes. On the grass beneath is an industrial lamp that rotates with slow, robotic gyrations.”
This unprecedented intervention amid cloisters and sandstone is met with mixed reactions. Don Lamb, an art historian at Peterhouse who is writing a monograph about skies in the works of rococo master Tiepolo, is particularly irked. For him, Sick Bed is emblematic of all that is wrong with contemporary art: the modern dismissal of transcendental beauty in favour of garish spectacle. Cahill uses Don’s conservative response to introduce his protagonist’s underlying anxiety about his place in a shifting world and, more broadly, to highlight Don’s characteristic rigidity. Don is something of an ascetic aesthete: adoring of expressiveness on the canvas, but a bastion of prudence in real life. A bachelor and scholar in his early 40s who has been at Peterhouse since his undergraduate days, Lamb’s is “a life of sexual abdication”: erudition dominates, while his gayness is studiously repressed.
Don’s fixation on Sick Bed reaches its apogee when, in inflammatory mood, he appears on Radio 4 and madly rants about the “grotesque” sculpture. Shortly afterwards, he’s whisked away to London to take up a new role at the Brockwell Collection, a dead ringer for Dulwich Picture Gallery. He moves into the London pied-à-terre of his Mephistophelean mentor Valentine Black. Nicknamed The House Beautiful, to Don it is “like a fantasy: soft-lit, lined with silk, filled with French furniture and small masterpieces of Italian mannerism ... ancient statuary [and] tapestries woven with chivalric tales. The place throbs with taste and cultivation.”
The early chapters can feel a little too expositional as Cahill works hard to concretely establish the details of Don’s milieu in Cambridge, his past and his prickly sensibility. At the same time, the plot thunders ahead at breakneck speed, bolting from setpiece to setpiece: lectures, frosty dinners at high table, sun-dappled flashbacks to Don’s arrival at the university. The move to Dulwich, where the pace evens out for a time, is very welcome. As a committed south Londoner, I was impressed by the evocative and accurate rendering of Dulwich’s chilly quaintness, this “oasis of parks and trees and well-kept Victorian villas in Tudor or gothic dress” that Don begins to call home. Cahill’s representations of the surrounding, starkly contrasting areas – Camberwell, Brixton, Oval – are meticulous and atmospheric. The 90s streets pulse with “visual noise and vivid sensation … An unused shop is plastered with posters repeating the name Jah Shaka […] The metal crowns of [two policemen’s] helmets flash erratically ... [there’s] a second-hand furniture shop where half of the stock seems to have been turned out on the pavement … Padded armchairs and battered tables, clapped out sofas, electric fires and a Formica chest rise in ramshackle piles, the flotsam of two decades ago.”.
The embodiment of the verve and unpredictability of this cityscape is artist Ben, a mercurial enfant terrible who breezily challenges Don’s dusty wisdoms, shows him the delights of Soho, takes him to openings of provocative and punky exhibitions. He instigates in Don “a mental rewiring, a vital recalibration”. Occasionally, I wondered if Ben was rendered as sufficiently charismatic to justify Don’s attentions and ardour. What is powerful here, however, is Cahill’s charged depiction of Don’s psychosexual awakening. Don’s desire for Ben is presented as distorting, dangerous, strange – capable of undoing the new life Don is trying to establish for himself in London.
Such delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge. We move from campus satire to something altogether stranger, more shadowy – queerer in every sense of the word. As the novel progresses, Cahill’s interest in concealed or doubled identities becomes more plain. Don’s grip on reality and selfhood slips and the text revels in darkly absurd interludes and flourishes.His friendship with Anna, the wife of a rather oleaginous rival at the Brockwell Collection, is a grounding element amid this mobility and liveliness. Their quiet and considered dialogue gives Cahill the opportunity to show us Don trying to make some sense of his expanding emotional and intellectual horizons. A shamanic drunk causes a scene in the gallery; the House Beautiful seems to possess its own enigmatic hermit. There’s also a brilliantly odd and revelatory episode in which Don passes out at work.
The confidence of Cahill’s sex scenes is worth mentioning too. Occasionally, perhaps in seeking to mirror the rich elaborateness of the artwork Don is researching, Cahill’s descriptions have a slightly melodramatic flavour. In his writing about physicality and bodies combining, however, he beautifully captures disorientation, tenderness and heat without tipping into excess.
This, then, is an electric new novel written by an author skilled in the evocation of vertiginous, heightened emotion. Its enticing oddness particularly extends to its indeterminate ending. After a wonderfully twisty denouement in which there are revelations aplenty, Cahill’s brave and testing conclusion will no doubt prove divisive. Arguably, Don’s fate is pleasingly apposite in its inscrutability. But some readers will find themselves deeply unsettled by a resolution that feels as intangible as the “pure, milky light” of Tiepolo’s celestial paintings.