Legend has it that 1967 was a marvellous year for London’s most swinging residents, whether it be getting stoned in Hyde Park or parking their Minis in the city’s first multi-storey car park. Boho glamour for some, but a decidedly post-war landscape for everyone else, exuding a greyness and reserve left over from the austerity years. In Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett, we’re transported to a furrier’s workshop just off Garlick Hill, EC4. Here we meet the outwardly dull and fastidious Mr F, the man the 1960’s forgot, whose hidden desires are set to ignite a nightmare of rage and shame.
Despite working for the company all his adult life, the nondescript Mr F remains unknowable to his colleagues. Perhaps they guess that Mr F is a man who has never invited anyone into his bed, never even let his hand brush against another’s while attempting to open his Evening Standard on a crowded train. They couldn’t, however, begin to imagine the maelstrom of emotion that has possessed their introverted colleague since the calendar tipped into 1967.
After nearly thirty-three years of the same daily routine, something new has started to happen to Mr F; a dark and disturbing recurring dream. His bathroom, sterile under a bare lightbulb, and hanging upside down, the naked, lifeless body of an athletic young man. He is suspended like ‘a beast on a butcher’s hook,’ and Mr F cannot see his face.
Night after night, the dream leaves him shaken and sleepless. On the morning that this results in him being uncharacteristically late for work, Mr F discovers that he’s being joined by a protégé at the cutting bench. The boss’s nephew, handsome in a tight suit and already nicknamed Beauty by the girl machinists.
Mr F’s life will never be the same again.
Bartlett is a brilliant storyteller, his novel of repression and desire shot through with a chilling tension. He carefully stokes Mr F’s night fevers over the course of a baking hot summer. At work, Mr F is showing Beauty how to use various furrier’s blades and techniques, at home he is tormented by the faceless man in his dream and accompanying inchoate desires. Bartlett steers us towards a heart-stopping finale.
Many of the novel’s scenes are gloriously cinematic, particularly those of London; sulphurous sunsets over the Thames, a bus ride along Kennington Road, the inner sanctum of the National Gallery with its luminous, fleshy portraits of saints and warriors.
And back home, climbing the stairs to his flat, the stained glass window on the shabbily carpeted landing casting a lurid carmine glow across Mr F’s body; he is aghast at its resemblance to blood, the way it almost appears to be soaking into the cloth of his suit, ‘…the way the white skin of his wrist, as he held his front door key in readiness, was stained scarlet.’
By turns ominous, unexpected and moving, Bartlett’s psychological tale of time, place and past is a profound and moving read. Originally published in 2007, it deserves a place on the literary lists of great London novels.
Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett is published by Serpent’s Tail, 352 pages.
