The Book of Revelation - Hardcover

Thomson, Rupert

3.57

1,167 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375409270 ISBN 13: 9780375409271

Publisher: Knopf, 2000

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"He felt them begin to touch him. Sometimes their hands were tender, sometimes they were only curious, but there was no part of him, no curve or hollow, that they did not, in the end, explore."
On a bright spring day in Amsterdam, a young man steps out of his studio to buy a pack of cigarettes. A dancer and choreographer, he would seem to have made the life of his choice: an international reputation; an exquisite French girlfriend, from whom he's been inseparable for seven years; careful plans for an interesting future, with no regrets lingering in his past. Moreover, he is charismatic and physically beautiful.
Then, passing through a dark alley, he is accosted by three cloaked and hooded women -- fans, he briefly thinks -- who drug and then hold him their sexual prisoner. Their motivations remain to him as mysterious as the story of his abduction seems unbelievable, even laughable, to those in whom he later confides his plight and shame. Those eighteen days of bizarre captivity, and the subsequent years of his life, make The Book of Revelation a wildly compelling and deeply disturbing account of the most forbidding aspects of the human psyche.

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Review:

Rupert Thomson has a solid reputation as a cult writer: his earlier books have garnered increasing acclaim without ever really propelling him into the authorial big time. Still, his 1998 novel, Soft!, marked a definite upswing in terms of recognition. And it would be a shame if The Book of Revelation, his sixth and latest, didn't continue this trend, given its level of psychological and aesthetic daring.

The narrator of Thomson's book is a dancer living in Amsterdam. One day he goes out to buy some cigarettes for his girlfriend--also a dancer--and is kidnapped and held for a period of time before being released. It would be unfair to give away too much more. But suffice it to say that each development adds an additional coordinate to what we might call the novel's emotional geography. Indeed, the Dutch metropolis seems to be a full participant in this intricate fiction:

There was a sense in which the city had been trying to tell me something all along. You'll never solve this case. You might as well forget it. But I had not been listening, of course. Look at the map. It's all there, in a way. The whole story.

At a time when so many writers are obsessed with trauma--particularly child abuse and its psychological fallout--Thomson chooses to explore the concept through an event that is both more and less sensational. The narrator's ordeal evokes the sort of highly ritualized bastinado that we encounter in, say, Story of O. Yet the author distances us from these events by switching from the first to the third person, a simple device that complicates and deepens the effect of the book as a whole.

Thomson's strange, disturbing tale asks profound questions about the burden of the past, especially of past events that set one apart from others. In this sense, The Book of Revelation chips away at the very notion of objectivity. How do we relate to others when we have experienced events that defy explanation or resolution? Perhaps such truths can be delivered only by (as it were) revelation. --Burhan Tufail

From the Publisher:

"It's an effective and disturbing performance, and Thomson's sentences are as clean, cool and unsparing as a surgeon's blade."
-- Anthony Bourdain, New York Times Book Review

"Outdoes himself with this absorbing tale of captivity and obsession. . . . One of the most eerily original novels of recent years. Thomson's masterpiece."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"A beautifully crafted journey into and out of sexual servitude...produces a state of emotional wonder in the reader long after the last page is turned."
-- Newsday

"An unorthodox taut thriller...by turns poignant and disturbing."
-- Wall Street Journal

"Spellbinding...a gender-bending version of The Story of O."
-- Time

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