In spite of the rather inelegant title of his new novel, Quentin S Crisp is a  renowned stylist whose literary production, although confined within the world of small, indie press, has been widely  praised for its beautiful narrative fashion and  its exquisite phrasing.

My personal enthusiasm for Crisp’s superb writing  style has been sometimes attenuated by a certain degree of smugness, a tendency to an excess of introspection  to the detriment of a proper development of the stories’ narrative structure.

In the present novel I’m happy to say that the writer has reached a  mature, laudable balance between the great elegance of his prose and the requirements of  solid storytelling.

The plot revolves around Ramsey, a young man who ends up finding a job as a teacher in the very elementary school where he was a student in his childhood. The return to his ancient roots revives many memories of the past , but, in due time, the reader will discover that other, unpleasant memories are actually buried in the depth of Ramsey’s mind . The arrival of Norman, a difficult child, in Ramsey’s class will  destabilize his role as a teacher and will unearth unpleasant , past events he has conveniently forgotten.

The discovery of the atrocities perpetrated in the school in the present time as well as in the past, the tragedy of child abuse, the psychological and physical destruction of the outcast, the possible complicity of Ramsey himself in the horrors committed in the past constitute a tremendous  act of accusation against injustice and cruelty.

Rejected from a publisher on the grounds that it was ‘inhuman’ the book is actually about inhumanity as cleverly observed by Justin Isis in his clever introduction to the volume.

This time Crisp puts his enormous talent to use in reporting the hypocrisy and the ferocity of  the social community.

Crisp’s literary genre has always been difficult to classify: horror, dark fantasy or simply atypical mainstream fiction? I still don’t know, but whatever  label you want to put  (provided you’re able to do it) on this author’s work, what really matters is that this is fiction at its very best.

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