The Electric Michelangelo

The Electric Michelangelo is a gutsy and exuberant fairground sideshow of a novel, an homage to the tattooist's art and to the seaside resorts of the early twentieth century.

Cyril Parks lives at the Bayview Hotel in Morecambe, run by his mother Reeda. Rates are cheap at the Bayview, and Reeda specialises in caring for consumptives, who come from the northern industrial towns to choke up phlegm and wheeze in lungfuls of restorative seaside air. Cy helps out, carrying away the bowls of bloodied mucus, trying but failing as he does so to avert his eyes from the soupy mess.

In lieu of anything better to do, and hoping to exploit his artistic talent, Cy apprentices himself to the ghastly Eliot Riley, a freehand tattooist as renowned for his skill with the needle and ink as he is for his ability to drink himself into oblivion. Riley is a despicable human being, possessed of an impenetrable inner darkness, but in spite of this Cy stays with him to learn the craft. When Riley dies, and with his mother already in her grave, Cy sails for America, and sets up as the Electric Michelangelo on the shores of Coney Island.

Sarah Hall's canvas is the body, in all its bony, muscled, slushy glory and treachery. As Reeda's cancer eats into her, and Riley's alcoholism takes its grip on his insides, Cy learns the art of decorating the skin of the clients that wash up at his booth, and begins to understand what tattoos say about those who choose to be adorned with them.

This is earthy and pungent writing: the ship that transports Cy to America has a 'robust, metal sashaying', and the consumptives have 'roe-red mouths'. In fact, red blazes its way through the book, from the blood in the bowls and the burning Alhambra ballroom, to the sun setting on the horizon and the tattoed hearts on the punters. Hall picks intricately at her characters, just as the tattooist picks at skin with his needle, both of them revealing more of the picture with each passing minute.