The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall
(Published by Faber and Faber Ltd)
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The Electric Michelangelo is Sarah Hall’s second novel and was a Booker short-listed novel in 2004. Her first, Haweswater, won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the Betty Trask Award and the Lakeland Book Prize for Arts and Culture.
Electric Michelangelo is the life story of Cy Parks, born in Morecambe Bay, on the northwest coast of England to the landlady of a boarding house, the day after his father, a fisherman, has been lost at sea.
The novel starts with Cy as a child living in his mother’s hotel alongside the guests; a collection of consumptives coughing up flem and blood into basins which he dutifully caries away. In contrast to this Cy wonders at the bloody receptacles his mother carries out late at night from rooms in which young weeping women have been escorted into.
In his teens Cy is sought out by Eliot Riley, the self-proclaimed greatest tattoo artist in Morecambe to become his apprentice. Cy accepts this position and sets out to learn the art of tattooing and a great deal about another side of life; fighting, drunkenness and pain. At fifteen, his mother dies of cancer taking from him the last vestiges of gentleness and care. Being faced with the decision of moving away with his aunt or becoming the ward of Reilly, Cy chooses the latter. Though there is a quiet respect between the two Eliot continuously subjects him to verbal abuse and aggression and confers on him the extra job of carrying him home drunk and broken.
On Eliot’s death Cy moves to America, where he sets up his own tattoo business under the title The Electric Michelangelo on the infamous Coney Island boardwalk. Cy’s pervious home of bawdy shabbiness and good humour is juxtaposed with the roller coasters, freak shows and hardened curiosity of the American resort.
This book brings great beauty to the visceral quality of life, the inescapable blood, sinews, skin and sweat. The brutality and pain of life is omnipresent. Man’s inhumanity and abjection runs throughout, no more horrific than in passages on the murder of the circus’s celebrity elephant. The innocence of the animal is in someway mirrored in Cy, where other characters struggle and fight with life Cy remains somewhat apart throughout, He is an observer of the cruel spectacle.
The final part of the book sees Cy back in Morecambe with an apprentice of his own; Nina Shearer, the grandchild of a Morecambe bathing beauty whom Cy had fantasized over in his teens. Bringing the book around full circle, showing that no matter how difficult, life goes on.
I’m not someone who runs out and buys whatever book is lauded on the latest list preferring to furrow my own drill though an endless list of titles. I had eyed The Electric Michelangelo in libraries and the piles inside bookshop doors so was delighted to receive it for Christmas. Although my motto could have been “don’t believe the hype” here I was delighted to find there is some truth in book awards and PR pushiness. This is a mature novel from a young writer and the language is elegant, moving and evocative. Her sense of place arouses curiosity into history and sociology and use of metaphors is absolutely poetic.
It is not a book that will grab you through an exciting plot but engages through a quiet beauty. 
