The deadly space between /

Toby Hawk, 18, lives in London with his mother, Iso. The only other people in their world are Iso's Aunt Luce and Luce's much younger lover, Liberty--until Iso begins to date a mysterious older man. Toby reacts badly until he meets Roehm, who appears to be just as interested in Toby as he is in Iso. Roehm courts Toby, taking him out to dinner and then to see the secret laboratory where he works. Toby basks in Roehm's attention much the way Iso does. Initially, Luce disapproves of Roehm and the age difference between him and Iso, but when she meets him, she is gradually won over. Toby alternates between odd attraction to Roehm and jealousy of Roehm's relationship with Iso, with whom Toby has an unnaturally close bond. Roehm's intense scrutiny of the family eventually sends Iso and Toby running far from England and toward the dark secret of Roehm's existence. Darkly atmospheric and reminiscent of gothic and romantic fiction, Dunker's novel moves steadily toward a thrilling climax. --Kristine Huntley

Her literary reputation well established with Hallucinating Foucault and The Doctor, Duncker here draws on Mary Shelley, Herman Melville and Freud, yet the work is powerfully her own, erotically charged and, finally, enigmatic. Most of this provocative novel is narrated by London-bred Tobias, the 18-year-old son of Iso, an unmarried girl who gave birth to him before she was 16. She has never identified his father, and perhaps not unconsciously encourages him to be infatuated with her, even allowing him certain sexual freedoms. Iso is fascinated by a huge man, identified only as Roehm, 25 years her senior; he is physically overwhelming and intuitively aware of her feelings and movements. Tobias, no less than his mother, develops a near-sexual relationship with him. When Tobias discovers that Roehm is actually his father, the Oedipal nature of this strange mEnage X trois is evident. In Melville's words, they have transgressed the deadly space between. Tobias finally tries to kill Roehm, but is unsuccessful, and after he and Iso flee to the glacier-covered mountains of Switzerland (corresponding to Shelley's Arctic ice floes), Roehm follows. His body is soon discovered in a crevasse near their retreat. When Iso goes to the police to confess to having killed him, they laugh. They have examined the body, they say; it is two centuries old and has been identified as one Gustave Roehm, a Swiss alpinist. Mother and son depart, but find they are still not entirely free of Roehm. The major source Duncker fails to acknowledge is Henry James, and if her contemporary ghost story lacks the exquisite subtlety of The Turn of the Screw, it captures the imagination, grotesquely repellant yet sinuously compelling. (July 5) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Author of the multi-award-winning Hallucinating Foucault and a real find for anyone who cares about literary fiction, Duncker here comes up with the story of a teenager bound to his young mother by an incestuous relationship. But then a foreboding stranger wrecks the equilibrium. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Duncker (The Doctor, 2000) returns with an elegantly written, ultimately silly modern gothic featuring incest, sexual ambiguity, sadomasochism, and evil personified. Toby Hawk, 18, never knew his father and has lived isolated in the English suburbs with his mother, Isobel, a successful painter, in an intense relationship that sometimes crosses the line into incest. When Isobel takes a mysterious lover, Toby's jealousy turns to obsession with the man, and after he meets Roehm (one name only), he experiences sexual desire for him as well. Roehm's hands and breath are icy, the animals in his laboratory exhibit terror at his approach, he knows people's secrets and is able to manipulate computers as if by magic, even pulling Toby onto a virtual glacier. Who is he? Toby's father? An ex-Nazi? A Swiss botanist who died in 1786? Toby's great-aunt Luce has never met Roehm but fears he will kill Isobel. Luce's lesbian lover, a barrister, discovers that there's no record of Roehm's existence. Toby witnesses the primal scene between his mother and Roehm and enacts but fails to consummate the Oedipal acts of intercourse with her and murder of him. Duncker underlines the seriousness of her intent with references to Faust, Roland Barthes (on "Death of the Father") and passages from Frankenstein, whether as homage to Mary Shelley or to emphasize that this novel, too, deals with perverse fatherhood. Among unexplained mysteries for the reader are why Duncker chooses to include excessively lengthy excerpts from Toby's on-line research, as well as descriptions of Windows icons and familiar objects such as slot machines: Are these meant to create an effect of estrangement or did they merely need to be edited? Overwrought in content, gracefully subdued in tone: an entertainment that falls short of its apparently lofty goals. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.