Venus with the Midas touch

Luke Sutherland

Bloomsbury 10

A DAY draws on in London, that city "chock-full of folk from places that’ve failed them". Fished out of the Thames the night before, someone lies in bed, gradually turning into gold. Forced to take hormones by his pimp, Dsire’s pecs are fattening into unwanted breasts. Occasionally, he spits tiny, glittering nuggets into the sink. He is far from the South Ronaldsay of his childhood.

Dsire is gradually gilding because he is a saint, of sorts. Should he lay hands on you, or rather, should he lay you, you would tremble, wracked by visions of angels, orchards, trumpets and stars. He can floor a violent homophobe, make him helpless with love and lust, "the tiny breeze made by my eyelids enough to knock him flat".

Luke Sutherland is a writer and musician brought up in the Orkney Islands. His previous novels Jellyroll and Sweetmeat have received much acclaim for their visceral accounts of racism, drugs and violence. In a preface, he presents Venus as a Boy as a "found narrative", pieced together from Dsire’s box of memories and minidisks, its story featuring a brief but pivotal role for Sutherland himself.

The Orkney of the novel is bathed in a mixture of tenderness and bitterness.

Light fades over a drifting boat, floating "high above the ocean floor" as the seals cry thinly. On land, you can see "the guts of everyone’s private lives on show, and the menfolk propping up the bars, with their battered wives in tow, playing holier than thou".

It is a stranger landscape still if you’re gay, or black. Dsire was white before he turned gold, but as for sexual orientation, he says, "I hadn’t any". Bullied and beaten at home and at school, the arrival on the island of a family with two black children changes things.

The little boy is cornered on the steps of Cromarty Hall and forced to brand himself as a "black bastard" by a gang of older kids, after attempting to take part in a game. That child, Sutherland has admitted in interview, was him: "I had no idea what the word meant. Just as I didn’t understand when they called me, ‘You black c***.’ I’d never even heard anyone swear. I thought they had called me ‘currant’ and that it was a term of endearment. But it was the moment I knew that I was different."

Suddenly the teenage white ‘poof’ seems more acceptable. Dove, the gang leader, thinks himself a god, having once done a three-mile wheelie behind the school bus to Kirkwall. His high-five anoints you as one of the gang and books you a seat in his souped-up Ford Cortina. But Dove is a false messiah. Dsire’s truly religious experiences are with Tracy - during sex with her, he gets to see the angels and the orchards too. When she leaves him for university, he goes to London and starts to sell himself in a complex transaction of masochism and redemption.

"What better than to find yourself through loving someone else? To be simultaneously gifted divinity and ecstasy?" asks Dsire. Love, he believes, is the answer to all the questions raised at our society’s margins - those of gender, sexuality and ethnicity.

But love is not enough, says the novel conclusively, as Dsire is martyred by love, falling victim to hepatitis.

This unconventional contemporary saint suffers an ancient and canonical faith, defeated and disfigured. Venus as a Boy is missing the melodic affirmation and political complexity of another Scottish novel of similar themes, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet. Yet all told, its simplicities are gloriously redeemed by the novel’s intricate take on sexuality, and its ecstatic and gilded prose.