Product Description

'An astonishing, heart-rending tour de force' - Pat Barker. "The Abomination" chronicles the life of Santiago Moore Zamora, a young man born to a beautiful, emotionally distant Spanish mother and an austere English father. Adrift in a world of nameless one night stands, living in a London of suffocating hedonism, he remembers his early years in Spain and sudden exile to boarding school in England where two proscribed love affairs set him on a course apart. 'Golding's tale is no simple fable of innocence lost or trust abused; rather, it is a chilling dissection of inexorable, irreversible alienation ...This unflinching novel deserves to be read' - "Guardian." 'This is an accomplished first novel ...stylish, clever, experimental, ambitious, urbane' - "TLS." '"The Abomination" is astonishingly assured; the strongest debut since The Swimming-Pool Library' - "Independent."

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #338879 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review

High summer in a sweltering London club, and I'm getting into my drunken stride after midnight, rubbing sweat with the shoulders that pass by, and thinking vaguely about another drink, or about cruising the pissoirs

The opening lines of Paul Golding's first novel, The Abomination, set the scene and tone of this provocative and intimate, story. Dedicated to a "haunting, unspeakable variant of love", Santiago Moore Zamora begins, and ends, his sexual chronicle in the clubs and dungeons of the "outcast children of Sodom and Gormorrah": the boys and men, lovers and prostitutes, who, in this version of the contemporary sexual metropolis, work "like buggery for their treacherous futures" and live on the edge of "the troubles" that haunt Zamora's narrative.

The Abomination revels in sex and language, the texture and depth of bodies and words. Two relatively brief sections on the contemporary London scene frame the bulk of a narrative that takes its readers back into Zamora's childhood and youth: his privileged early years in Spain; the loneliness, and lusts, of life at an English boarding school (the analogy with the pleasures of the sexual dungeon is an overt theme of the book). Isolated, Zamora seeks redemption in the figure of Mr Wolfe: "I choose to lose my way back to the dormitory and find myself, instead, at his door. I'm nine years old. Don't look so shocked". In this way, Golding lets his readers know that he knows that his subject is controversial: childhood sexuality, love and sex between adult and child, its impact on sexual life in adulthood. Golding offers a tour de force for those with the stamina to make it through to the end. --Vicky Lebeau

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Customer Reviews

Disturbing yet breathtaking
Dealing with abuse in a fiction can be a laboured and often very one sided excercise, what The Abomination manages to do is both repulse the reader whilst simultaniously allow you to beleive that the narrator could be complicit in the acts carried out on him. It is a brave subject matter handled brilliantly i cant wait to read more from this superb new voice.

A gay view of �child abuse�
Paul Golding: The Abomination

The Abomination revolves around the life of a boy in a British boarding school who finds himself the object of sexual attention from his male teachers, starting at the tender age of nine.

Yet in all the book's 515 torrid pages, quite a few of them unflinchingly graphic in their portrayal of sex between an adult and a child, the word "paedophilia" appears not once. It's the dog that mysteriously fails to bark in the night and its absence is a key to The Abomination. This is, you see, a profoundly gay book rather than one written from the perspective of a paedophile or "boy-lover".

A man's love for another man and a man's sexual involvement a young boy are by no means the totally separate phenomena insisted upon in the expedient and hypocritical denials of gay political rhetoric, and the love of a young boy for a much older male (yes, it happens) need not necessarily lead the younger partner to think of the man in his life as anything other than gay. Even as he snuggles into the arms of "his" man, he may think of paedophiles (if he has heard of the word) as an alien species he has never encountered, monsters met only in the media.

The narrative of The Abomination is in the first person. It is Iago's own account of his life, starting from an infancy and early childhood in which his sensitive, girlish preoccupations make themselves felt long before any hint of possible "seduction" into the gay world and a gay identity. By the time his detested stiff-upper-lip British father insists on "making a man of him" by packing him off to school in England, he is already alienated. Then, at school, he is an outsider who finds himself doubly rejected, both as a foreigner and as a sissy. School proves to be sheer hell from start to finish. The only respite Iago finds from its crass religious indoctrination, brutal rituals and treacherous false friends is in the company of his two adult lovers.

The first of them, Mr Wolfe, is a tender, kindly man, young and good-looking, whose amorous attentions leave the youngster with "laud applause" in his heart. But, as I say, this is a gay book and certainly not paedophile propaganda. The second teacher to go well beyond the official curriculum with him is Dr Fox. Both lovers' names suggest predators and Dr Fox - fat, smelly, decrepit, manipulative and none too scrupulous over the matter of consent - is as repulsive a specimen as any moral conservative could wish to see in such a role: one could hardly imagine a figure more suitable for a cautionary tale aimed at deterring juvenile experimentation.

But wait. Wait right till the last page, for matters are not so simple. The ghastly Dr Fox morphs into a good companion, a stalwart patron of Iago's later school years. We hear the grown Iago celebrate Stonewall and laud the gay liberation movement. But we also see him promiscuously cruising the seediest of gay clubs in an increasingly lonely, loveless, desperate search for "Mr Right".

What has gone wrong? Iago's sexual odyssey into adulthood is neither an endorsement not indictment of gayness by author Paul Golding. Just as it is not paedophile propaganda, neither is it the gay variety. Rather it is an exploration of destiny. Iago, we are powerfully led to infer, was bound to be gay, his identity partly constructed in reaction to adversity but far more profoundly an essential element of his earliest being. We are left feeling that what will be will be, in all its often messy, unsatisfactory reality. We are what we are and must simply make the best of it.

The only unavoidable conclusion is that the heterosexual moralisers (among whom, of course, there is never divorce, never loneliness, never despair, never suicide) should be seen as a grossly negative factor in the young Iago's life. To suggest that they, rather than his lovers, "scarred him for life" is perhaps too facile: ultimately we must all take responsibility for our lives rather than feebly surrendering to a victim culture. But we can be sure that those who would fit us all to the procrustean bed of conventionality are not going to leave the world full of happy bunnies if they succeed - and shooting all the Wolves or Foxes merely vandalises the delicate ecology of erotic diversity. It hurts, not helps, the Iagos among us.

Review by Tom O'Carroll. Email: tomoqatar@yahoo.ie

In the erudite,florid steps of Anthony Burgess
Other reviewers give you the detail of the extraordinary story in this superb book. But, for those who miss the baroque, extravagant prose of Burgess, this is a rewarding work. When Golding moves on from his "autobiographical" preliminary works to entirely invented storytelling, he may well become a Booker Prize contender. I, for one, look forward to such works with impatience.