BR: Cutting through skin (Michael McCoy)

The back cover reads:

‘Sometimes I would close my eyes with the tip of the scalpel poised and ready and just feel its progress as it cut through the skin. I’d hold the blade in my hand and press, expectantly and sightlessly through the skin. Feeling the release. Feeling the joy’

With his PhD recently finished, Matthew Bass is adrift in his work as a prosector in the Department of Anatomy. He is attracted to the sexually well-practised Zoe, a fellow cutter with bizarre religious beliefs. Almost willingly, Matt lets lip his grip on reality until, with Zoe’s encouragement, he pushes his newly discovered ideas on life and death to their ultimate extreme.

I chose this book because of the title and the references to the characters being cutters, but they are not the cutters that I am accustomed to so that came as a disappointment.

The novel is written in alternating viewpoints of the four main characters, Matt, Zoe, Frank and Rushworth. Rushworth is Matt’s father and Frank is an academic of similar vintage who is friends with them both, and worried about Matt’s increasingly erratic behaviour. The setting is modern day Melbourne, which was another selling point. It’s refreshing to read novels set in environments I know.

The book opens with Matt walking into a hold-up in progress. The event affects him deeply.

September 22^nd. The day I came to believe was my birthday. My real birthday.

I stopped to get petrol. Pulled up, filled the tank and walked across the concrete from the pump towards the sliding glass doors, petrol fumes rising thickly from my hands in the fat afternoon air. A dog lay asleep just outside the door, her fur twitching easily in her dreams and shining back at me like eddies in a black mirror, before giving way to a row of dry, weathered nipples on her belly. And in her face you could read a perfect, mindless contentment. She was the kind of dog you’d like to whistle into the back of your car and take home with you. To share in some of that mindless contentment.

Maybe five steps from the door I felt a hand on my shoulder, firm and with a purpose to the pressure it exerted, rather than just a blundering push to get me out of the way. Then an instant later there was the gun.

I read this much in the bookstore and decided to buy the book. I don’t regret my purchase, but the story did not pan out as I had imagined. In several places it was bogged down with repetitive prose; characters who engaged in lengthy monologue in their heads, making the reader proxy to their thoughts. Initially I didn’t mind being along for the ride, impressed by the writing style and distinctive imagery, but it eventually grew old.

Also, I lacked the ability to connect with any of the characters in a way that would allow me to care for them, to fear for them, to stand beside them and cheer them on. Aside from the opening chapter – the petrol station hold-up – the remaining chapters were lengthy and dry, driven only by Matt’s unusual behaviour and Zoe’s belief that she was the religious figure Eve and Matt was Adam.

The story took a disturbing direction when Matt’s father dies and Matt breathes in what he believes is the soul of his dying parent. He takes Rushworth’s last breath, seals their lips and sucks it in. If I had been involved with the characters enough to really care about them, then this event would have bothered me greatly, instead it just freaked me out – I mean, who does that!? It’s unnerving.

If it weren’t for the poetic writing style, though arguably a tad overdone, I’d not have finished the book at all. As an example, Matt meets with Frank at the racecourse after having been out of touch for some weeks. This is in Frank’s POV.

‘Morning; Frank,’ he replied, like a working dog. ‘What are we doing here?’

He was all hunkered down on himself as if his bones were chilled through to the marrow. It wasn’t cold, though. No one else was cold. So he had to be hiding something. It wasn’t thermoregulation that was curling him into a ball, it was emotional regulation, you’d have guessed. Or maybe he had his hands stuffed deep in his trouser pockets in an effort to trap the smell from inside his underwear.

I had to smile.

‘What are we doing here?’ I repeated, still grinning. “I thought we could have a chinwag, Matty, that’s what. Sit and natter while God’s most beautiful parade their wares in front of us.’

I stood there in the lower reaches of the grandstand, my arm sweeping across all before us, as if we were in a gallery full of Rembrandts and Picassos and Van Goghs. He sat down next to me, hands still shoved in his trouser pockets and collar turned u against the wind that didn’t blow. He didn’t even look at what I was showing him. Didn’t even know I was trying to show him anything. Not interested in knowing. He gazed at me as though I’d traded my last drop of nous for a bus ticket to an empty circus ground.

The novel definitely is literary in the common sense of the word, being rambling, introspective and explorative of psychology, philosophy and religion, but it lacks an intangible element that would have made it memorable.

Rating: *** out of five