Glen Duncan

An educated young man's obsession with pornography causes the collapse of his relationship with the one woman he has ever loved, in a funny, poignant confessional novel that explores friendship, sexual illicitness, and moral malaise. A first novel.

Hope

Ipek

This was a fascinating read for me, but part of that fascination is something that the author probably couldn't have intended or even foreseen originally - that is, our very much changed relationship with pornography and how it compares to Gabriel's feelings about it. The novel is set in the late eighties or early nineties, I'm guessing, a time before internet was ubiquitous and easily accessible. The times changed, internet became ubiquitous and easily accessible, and can you guess what else did? That's right, pornography did. And that altered our relationship with pornography, I would argue - not because overnight we turned into inveterate consumers of porn but simply because it was just out there, as something you could look at whenever you liked, at the comfort of your own home, sofa, desk, whatever. Not the furtive business of going to a shop where they sell porn magazines and trying to pick one, all the while worrying that someone you know is going to see you and judge you, that whole ordeal Gabriel would have to go through. I get that difficult access to porn and society's stance towards it is not the only thing that defines his conflicts and problems, there's (view spoiler)[ what I would call childhood trauma  (hide spoiler)], there's his Catholic upbringing, and every little and big thing that goes into the making of a person with their fears and hang-ups and dysfunctions -- but it was a very central one, I thought. 

And all the while I read, I kept asking myself just how much would things have turned out differently for him had Gabriel come of age in today's sexual (or maybe I should say pornographic) climate. This book made me ask the right kind of questions -- not of the "how the fuck does that happen, people don't behave like that" variety but of the much more engaging and interesting "OK then, but what if..." sort. And I don't have the answer to the question I'm asking, and that's fine by me.

Hope

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