Thongs

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

‘Eroticism is, I believe, the approval of life even to the point of death,’ wrote Glasgow-born novelist Alexander Trocchi in an early student essay at Glasgow University and this statement neatly sums up the half-dozen erotic novels he wrote in Paris between 1954 and 1956.

The theme of Thongs is masochism and brutality, and how they feed off each other. Like much of Trocchi’s fiction, including his better-known novels, Cain’s Book and Young Adam, there is a central character isolated from the mores of normal society.

The novel opens, shockingly, with the discovery of the crucified and mutilated body of a woman on a Spanish hillside. Framed by the literary device of a ‘found manuscript’ and an anonymous narrator, the action shifts to the Gorbals of 1916 and a brutal confrontation between the Razor King, John Gault and his own son.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspect of the novel for a Scottish reader is the recurring references to the milieu of that famous — or notorious — novel No Mean City by Alex McArthur and H. Kingsley Long. Published in 1935, that had proved astonishingly popular though condemned as cheap trash by the established and the literary world. Some sections of the novel are neat parodies of some of that earlier fiction’s worst excesses and there is an obvious similarity in the respective protagonists’ names; John Gault and John Stark.

In Thongs Gertrude Gault, the daughter and sister of Razor Kings, is at the epicentre of a brutal world whose denizens ‘had a mute hunger for violence, common to each of them, [which] held them together, reinforcing, animating…’ Brutality here is endemic, a strong bond that binds individuals together as both aggressor and victim and tightly restricts the possibilities of humane feeling.

Abused and assaulted, Gertrude finds in herself a predisposition to be a willing victim. Living at the edge of pain, she absorbs it into herself. Introduced to a mysterious mansion in the West End, she begins a career as a masochist which leads her to London, and eventually to her reincarnation and crucifixion in Spain as Carmencita de las Lunas.

The ‘thongs’ of the title is the animating and all-pervasive lust for violence as much as the instruments of the whipping hierarchy of the Pain Cardinals whom she encounters.

The writing, especially in the Glasgow section, is raw, naturalistic, graphic and forceful — almost Trocchi at his most considerable best, while the shorter London and Spanish sections seem more diffuse and almost melodramatic. One of Trocchi’s greatest strengths as a prose writer is the integrity and discretion of tone which he maintains throughout and which acts to unify what is in effect two separate and rather disparate elements.

Last reprinted in 1971, the novel was considered by several famous and not-so-famous film directors but never quite made it to the cinema screen. In this attractive edition by Blast Books, who have subsequently reprinted Trocchi’s White Thighs, it is certainly not ideal summer reading for your favourite Auntie, least of all your Auntie Grundy if you have one!

Andrew Murray Scott

Book: THONGS (novel)

Author: Alexander Trocchi

Publisher: Blast Books (USA)