Review: The Tattooist - Louise Black

The effect of Fifty Shades of Grey has been almost inescapable. Indeed, until drastic measures were taken, one couldn’t even browse the WH Smiths website without turning up a litany of rape and incest porn. With its scenes of outré sex and dominance, Louise Black’s debut novel has walked through a door opened by EL James, as she acknowledged in a blogpost for netmums, but Black is no bandwagon-jumper. Her short fiction has been published in the Erotic Review for over a decade, and she has also completed a PhD on George Bataille. The Tattooist is a dark, sometimes philosophical novel about power, transformation and alchemy, with a subversive edge. 

Bataille’s work is known for its anarchic, boundary-defying energy. He believed that our well-ordered social constructs hide an unstable energy at their core; while everything may appear rational on the surface, there is in fact a limitless potential for chaotic activity underneath. It is this energy that Black's protagonist, Fabrice, seeks to unlock among his conquests. Fabrice is a tattooist, with a parlour in Paris' 17th arrondissement. He specialises in covering up body art which his clients regret, wiping out the elements of their past they want to forget, the names of ex-lovers, or childish cartoon images. This interest in transformation goes deeper; he is fascinated by alchemy, the art of creating gold from base materials. When women come to him, the work he does on their bodies is only a starting point. He becomes involved in their lives, seeking to break down the women’s egos before bringing them together for a transformative erotic meeting which he believes will unlock a mystical power. 

His intellectual resources are dedicated to one aim; to acquire power over women. He 'worked with the dark matter of the feminine psyche. He stripped them as efficiently as crumbling pipes are ripped from a building'. Three women come to him for assistance; the Japanese teenager Yoshiko, sent to Europe by her domineering father as a prelude to the career he has mapped out for her in business, Zairah, a law student determined to break away from her cosy family surroundings, and Xanthe, a heavy drinker who has recently emerged from an abusive relationship with ‘Paul’, whose name is emblazoned on her back in eight inch letters. 

Fabrice is portrayed an austere figure, shaven-headed with ‘measured, economical movements’ and a ‘monk-like calm’. He sees himself as being ‘intuitive with women’, able to read the darker edges of their personalities, and push them towards exploring these boundaries. His background is troubled; a drunken mother, failure at school. However, his charisma and intelligence allows him to rise above these unpromising beginnings. While he doesn’t possess the riches of a Christian Grey, he is to some extent a self-made man. 

He is shown to be an arch manipulator. Fabrice is always careful to ask permission before entering a woman's home; but once inside, he delights in undermining them, for example using vocabulary Yoshiko can't understand. On their first date, he mutters 'what does your father do to you, little Yoshiko? Does he keep your soiled underthings in his briefcase to ecstatically sniff during empty moments at work?', enjoying her bewildered response. Many of the tactics he uses would be termed ‘negging’; he gets Yoshiko drunk, before pointedly asking if he can go for a shower: 'Yoshiko was surprised and immediately worried that she would seem dirty to him'. Sexually, he pushes them to expose themselves to him, constantly demanding that they go beyond their comfort zones. As he does this, he is careful to get their consent at each stage; later, he uses this consent to further undermine them, psychologically, and ward off accusations of ill-treatment.

Fabrice views the three women as a problem to be worked on methodically, in order to achieve his goal. His problem is that he has underestimated the secret energy which all three possess. The meek Yoshiko seems an ideal candidate for his plans, but a problem in her genetics thwarts him. Zairah has hidden reserves of strength, whilst Xanthe is the most dangerous of all. She is an unstable element, who has already survived an encounter with a crueller man than himself. She is aware of his power games, while her drinking makes her responses unpredictable. When Fabrice finally brings the women together, he unleashes a hidden power, but not the one he was aiming for.

It’s long been held that prose style is a problem for erotic fiction. In particular I’m reminded of The Story of O, which seemed to share a narrative voice with Private Eye’s Secret Diary of John Major. Black generally avoids these pitfalls; there is an occasional overuse on metaphor, and the word ‘bud’ crops up a bit too frequently, but there aren’t any somersaulting inner goddesses on display here, and she resists the urge to catalogue consumer durables. Instead, there are recurring images of transformation, as the gentrification of Paris is contrasted with Fabrice’s efforts to break down the women’s psyches, and the occasional glimpse of Bataille, as Fabrice dreams of making a pornographic film with images of a giant disembodied cock, coming ‘like a volcano erupting’.

In the final section of the novel, the narrative focus shifts from Fabrice onto Xanthe, who undergoes a breakdown; the shift is jarring at first, but her recovery, and the subsequent light it shines on Fabrice, is perhaps the most interesting element of The Tattooist, unexpectedly subverting the erotic archetype of the dominant male. Ultimately, he is seen as a ridiculous figure, the ‘monk’ who studies laws on consent as homework, and whose techniques rarely rise above the level of Neil Strauss. His attempts do indeed release a chaotic, suppressed power, but he is unable to control the consequences. I get the sense that this psychological exploration is more important to Black than the erotic sections, which are brief and intense, becoming less frequent as the novel progresses. The subversive element of The Tattooist is promising; and I suspect there is more to come from this author, a less conventional and more disturbing narrative waiting to come out.