The Sex Offender by Matthew Stadler

A book, sad to say, not worth reading.

The narrator, an ex-teacher and fully-grown man, has been convicted for molesting a 12-year-old boy. He and the child thought it was love. The Ministry of Health mean to rid him of this errant notion by any means necessary, including a series of bizarre experiments in the vein of A Clockwork Orange.

Trouble is, this plot begins in the opening chapter but then, aside from the protagonist’s misadventures with aversion therapy and largely irrelevant chat with his ‘Doctor-General’ psychologist which mostly involves the narrator trying to get inside his doctor’s head, this plot stalls until the very final chapters. Indeed, the object of the narrator’s love affair is barely mentioned until this fact is pointed out by the doctor (which feels like the author remembering) and suddenly is put back centre-stage as we hear news of the boy which is probably meant to subtly let us know that really the boy is upset that his lover was taken away and that he is resisting thinking what he’s being told he should think, but it’s heavy-handed enough that you feel the narrator is stupid not to see it too.

Anyway, this plot is shoved aside to make way for a bizarre, flimsy sci-fi story. Set in a future society slightly reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 but not nearly so extreme, our narrator starts to work for a ‘salon’ that performs extensive facial reconstruction surgery on politicians and other public figures, essentially erecting large masks around their faces. He becomes involved with an adolescent boy called Hakan (who just so happened to be in an erotic film shown as part of the ‘treatment’), involved both romantically and with his rebellion against the totalitarian state, and begins working on the face of the Prime Minister himself, leading to the book’s entirely predictable final twist. There’s also some adulation of a drag queen, but it’s really entirely irrelevant, a nice surreal image slipped in for its own sake.

Let us not forget the book is meant to be funny, bizarre and excessive and mannered, showing the ridiculousness of our world through the prismatic lens of another. But calling the book darkly comic is stretching the truth. There are allusions, too: to give you some idea of the level of most, here’s the Doctor-General’s name: Nicholas Nicholas.

Stadler writes well. Not so well that he’s above most of his literary peers, but well enough that I might one day pick up Stadler’s more successful book about men who love boys, this time without the irritating sci-fi setting and stabs at post-modernist cleverness and with a much more intriguing historical premise, Allan Stein.