 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Electric Michelangelo
By Sarah Hall
Faber & Faber $29.95
 Sarah Hall's beautifully crafted portrait of Cyril (Cy) Parks, a lad from the north-west British holiday resort of Morecombe Bay who becomes a master tattooist, was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize and is all the more remarkable for being a tough, blokey book penned by a woman.
In his early teens, Cy begins an unusual apprenticeship with a drunken brawler named Eliot Riley, walking to the tattoo parlour from his mother's guesthouse which is populated mostly by consumptives and visited after hours by hapless women seeking abortions.
Even in the bleak off-season, people seek tattoos from the reprobate Riley, whose skill with the cobbled-together equipment of the early 1920s is remarkable. Cy resents his mentor's harshness but admires his skill.
'He only had to watch Eliot Riley at work on a customer, see the true colour finding its way into skin, and he felt all the antagonism and resentment absconding. Because from this brutish man could come humane and brilliant art.'
Cy's first work is on 'his own cold, goose-pimpled shin... a little visit to pay his respects to the primary creators of the trade... tap-tap-tap... with a bamboo block and a hammer.' Then he graduates to electric tattooing and is pleased with his customers' reactions, especially the enthusiasm of women.
'That was one of the best kept secrets of the industry, that the inches of female bodies walking around in the street were as colourful as they were under their slips and girdles.'
When the unpopular Riley is plied with drink by some toughs and his working hand bashed to a pulp with a hammer, Cy emigrates to America where he sets up in New York's Coney Island district, a lurid counterpoint to drab north England.
He falls in love with the mysterious Grace, an émigré from central Europe who reveals a desire to be tattooed all over her body with a repetitive eye motif, marking a career move from circus rider to sideshow exhibit.
In a harrowing conclusion, Grace is disfigured by a religious fanatic seeking to 'cleanse' her with acid, and with her life in tatters she hatches a ghastly payback on the offender.
Years later, back in England and soon to retire, Cy finds himself an apprentice, a young woman with piercings who now wants a tattoo: 'He bent down and took out a box... containing a bamboo shaft and a hammer and he began to roll up his trouser leg.'
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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