In his 1996 Whitbread Award-nominated Mr Clive and Mr Page, Neil Bartlett depicted the trials of a gay man hoping to pass unnoticed in the bigoted society of 1920s London. His follow-up novel, Skin Lane, offers a very distinct portrait of another man in crisis. Its protagonist, Mr F, is so out of sync with himself that he is as ignorant of homosexuality as the rest of society.
Mr F is nearly 47 years old. He lives alone. Every day he wears the same brown worsted suit with two-inch turn-ups, buttoned waistcoat, trilby hat and impeccably clean cuffs. He's worked at the same furriers, on the aptly named Skin Lane in the City of London, for 33 years.
There's no obvious reason "why this man should seem so separate" and when we meet him, at the beginning of 1967, it seems impossible that anything could derail him from his well-regimented routine. Even a shocking dream, ripe with erotic symbolism, doesn't shake him out of his emotional paralysis - until it visits him every night, in exactly the same detail. Prior to the nightmares, sex had passed Mr F by. But when it confronts him in his unconscious, he is unable to defend himself against it: "Why had it stayed hidden for so long? What had dislodged it from its filthy bed? Where had it come from?"
Things become even more troublesome for him when Beauty, his boss's young nephew, arrives in Skin Lane to learn about the business. There follows a long and torturous summer, studded with furtive glances, moments of accidental contact and eventually a series of unfor tunate episodes that gives Mr F the chance to express his true feelings. But how can a man who "has never lived in the present tense before" address publicly his very immediate homosexual desires?
The London of 1967 which Bartlett renders so exquisitely is as far from the popular myth of a city at the heart of the Swinging Sixties as it is possible to get. But although Mr F might believe that the things he reads about in the London Evening Standard "are happening in somebody else's world", he's much closer to national events than he thinks. In fact, he is the sort of man the then home secretary Roy Jenkins was talking about that very summer, when he said during a parliamentary debate on the rights of homosexuals (and bear in mind he was fighting for a more liberal attitude) that "those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of loneliness, guilt, shame and other difficulties". On the very day the Sexual Offences Act was finally passed (28 July 1967), Mr F is wondering how it would feel to hold the naked body of a young man: "How sweet the weight of him in my arms."
The prose is precise. Bartlett savours the moments of eroticism when they happen to Mr F as if making up for every second of his wasted years: the passionate kisses of a dream made flesh and a wonderfully evocative moment when he finds himself marooned in Leadenhall Meat Market with all the dead carcasses. Mr F is finally getting in amongst it, instead of satisfying himself, as he has always done, with the outer skin.
The denouement, when it comes, is palpable and heartbreaking. It perfectly encapsulates the feeling of frustrated, passionate desire for something that is unattainable. At the same time, it wonders at the cost: "If you had never woken me, I could have slept for ever."
Bartlett, a celebrated theatre director as well as a novelist, has written a rich and subtle story by successfully stitching together the remnants of a man's life - as it falls apart around him - and the fabric of a city at a pivotal point in its history.
