FLESHWORLD

Carole Morin

(Dragon Ink, £11.99)

From its very first page, Carole Morin’s darkly disorientating dystopia puts its readers on edge, plunging them into a strange and seemingly unknowable future that only gets more discomforting the more she reveals of it.

Fleshworld, Morin’s fifth novel, is set in a London which has been split into two parts following the rise of the Pure Party. The Pure World is all about chaste living and self-denial. Its flipside, Fleshworld, reached by crossing over a deep pit filled with flesh-eating insects, is the repository of our basest human desires, and residents of Pure World can get day passes to wallow temporarily in its depravity.

This future London is toxic and riddled with disease, and sex is the most hazardous thing of all. Narrator Rich Powers is the creator of Safe, a vaccine which protects against sex decay, apparently a form of leprosy. Those who can afford it inject Powers’ vaccine daily, making Pure World a place divided between “old people, safe in their fortresses, and feral children roaming in search of food and fun”.

Some of the wealthy old people protected by Safe still indulge clandestinely in the pleasures of the flesh, and it’s after Rich persuades his wife, Ice, to attend an orgy that his life goes off the rails. Ice leaves their luxurious, impregnable home, taking only a few days’ worth of the Safe vaccine with her. Convinced that she has crossed the border into Fleshworld, Rich comes up with a plan to get her back that would cost him his soul, if he thought he still had one worth saving.

For, like everyone we see in both Pure World and Fleshworld, Rich is a deeply damaged person. Flashbacks to his childhood show him tormented by his mother, a zealous early recruit to the Pure Party, whose attempts to terrify the boy into a life of chastity culminated in an attack on his genitals with a pair of scissors. The scissor attack isn’t even the low point of Rich’s dysfunctional history with his mother: a gruesome incident later in his life drives home just how messed up both of them have become.

His upbringing has instilled in him a lifelong self-loathing matched only by his internalised misogyny. Doubting that he can ever be truly loved, he suspects his trophy wife (“my happy ending”, he describes her at one point) of only wanting him for his money, and he expresses his devotion in the form of surveillance cameras planted all over the house and tracking devices in her earrings. Meeting an under-age prostitute in a bar, he automatically amends her name from Trish to Trash and, disregarding all concerns for her safety, treats her as a worthless pawn who serves no other purpose than to further his plans.

Fleshworld is a dark, transgressive novel shot through with blunt misogynistic language and disturbing sexual imagery. But, amidst the rape and murder, the abuse of children, the repeated violation of women’s bodies and even suggestions of necrophilia, there’s a story about a lost child falling in with a lost couple that offers all three of them a chance to haul themselves out of the purgatory of their lives.

There are some rather on-the-nose character names (Rich Powers himself, a sleazy pimp named Bad), and the final threat feels as though it’s been tacked on to spice up the ending with a bit of jeopardy. But this provocative, skilfully-written novel is a compelling take on guilt, self-loathing, the acceptance of penance and the longing for redemption.