The Virgin of Flames Chris Abani Jonathan Cape, 304pp, £12.99 ISBN 0224081624
Burning brush fires and ash raining from the sky provide a fittingly unsettling backdrop for Chris Abani’s story of life’s outsiders.
Black is an artist living in grimy East Los Angeles. His friends include Iggy, a tattoo artist with steel hooks threaded through the skin of her back, and Ray-Ray, a dwarf with an addiction to joints dipped in formaldehyde. Black is struggling to make sense of himself. Ghosts from the past bleed into his world and the voice of the Angel Gabriel echoes in his head. Occasionally he dresses up in Iggy’s wedding dress and sits in a homemade “space ship” on top of his building. He becomes infatuated with a cross-dressing stripper called Sweet Girl, and gains some release in painting a vast mural of the Virgin Mary.
Abani’s novel contains some arresting imagery. Though it raises some interesting questions about human sexuality and about poverty and ethnicity in urban America, it’s extremely uneven in tone and the plot takes a long while to take off. Ultimately, it’s an ambitious but muddled work. The meandering build-up makes any emotional connection with the characters difficult, especially in the intense final scenes, but Black’s world is never less than vividly depicted and the writing contains moments of real tenderness and beauty.
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