Naomi Delap
I feel sorry for writers these days. It’s so terribly difficult to be iconoclastic, what with the Irvine Welsh backlash just about to break and that sinking feeling you get whenever blurb describes anything as remotely Tarantinoesque. There are no new subjects to write about, and any attempt at novelty eventually and inevitably seems to hoist itself with its own petard. Perhaps the answer is not to try.
Julian Rathbone’s new novel is his twenty-third; he’s an old-fashioned kind of an author, of some standing in the literary world. Intimacy’s primary subject is incest, but while some writers would look on one of society’s last major taboos as a call for sensationalism, Rathbone handles the whole tricky area with no small amount of subtlety and skill.
David Querubin is the world’s last great castrato singer, a peerless interpreter of baroque and rococo music, who has retired as a professional musician because of ill-health and failing eyesight. To his beautiful Andalucian villa comes Petra Von Sturm, a young singer whose talent persuades Querubin to take her on as his pupil, teaching her the castrato roles which have made him famous.
Ensconced in the villa, Petra starts to learn about the music that David so loves, but also to question the mystery surrounding his adolescence in Spain’s troubled 1930s, and the true nature of his relationship with his adored mother. Are David’s memories of that time true, or pure sexual fantasy? And how did he come to be castrated?
Rathbone approaches the subject of incest without any seeming desire to shock, presenting rather the two sides of the argument that incest is “natural” (because it happens), but that the psychological fallout is, perhaps invariably, incredibly disturbing. He shows incestuous relationships that are ill-judged but full of sweetness, beautiful but tragic. There is an element of titillation in reading the book, but I think that comes from the reader (certainly this reader), and a conditioned response to the subject.
It’s not the unfolding revelations that provide the book with its primary impetus or interest, because of their seeming inevitability. Intimacy develops as organically as the descriptions of the changing Andalucian seasons. The sensuality of the landscape is linked in its turn with the measured development of the style of music valorised in the book; no less passionate because of its control. It refuses to build to a romantic climax (in the Wagnerian sense), and in that restraint lies the novel’s strength.
Julian Rathbone’s prose is resonant and sedate at the same time; he is not young, neither is he groovy in an ephemeral way. However, Rathbone has managed what many literary upstarts have failed to do: namely to subvert. And he has achieved this through signally avoiding the temptation to shock.
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