Mourning becomes an Electra
Francis King
ADVENTURES IN THE ALASKAN SKIN TRADE by John Hawkes Chatto &Windus, £9.95 The 'skin trade' of the title of John Hawkes's rich, robust, tumultuous new novel is both the obvious one so long the lynch-pin of the Alaskan economy and the trade of the narrator, Sunny, 'the toughest and sexiest woman in Alaska', as proprie- tress of a classy brothel known far and wide as the Alaska-Yukon Gamelands.
Sunny arrives in Alaska as a small child, with her adventure-loving father John Deauville (pronounced 'Dough-veal', the reader is obligingly instructed) and her mother Sissy, fated soon to have her spirit broken and her health destroyed by the desolate, wind-seared expanses of a place so bleakly different from her native Con- necticut. Deauville (or Uncle Jack, as he is known to his adored and adoring daughter) has been driven to Alaska partly by the Wall Street crash, partly by the hope of finding gold or some other precious metal, but mostly by the dream of locating a rumoured totem-pole, carved by Indians profoundly moved by a missionary's tale of the president who freed slaves, of Lincoln surmounting a column of bears, frogs, birds and other creatures, in frock-coat and stove-pipe hat.
Uncle Jack, like some self-vaunting hero of epic, a Beowulf or Odysseus, fills the book, as he fills Sunny's adolescent im- agination, not merely with his exuberant, amiable, reckless presence but with stories in which he constantly shines out as a lone figure successfully battling against the treachery of the elements, the malevolence of animals, and the folly and hostility of his fellow men. He makes perilous expeditions in ramshackle planes on errands of mercy to remote corners of the country. He all but loses his life in a duel with an outsize bear. He spends a night stuck on the sheer face of a mountain, triumphs in a contest of wills with an oafish fox-farmer, and man- ages to save his boat when it has foundered on rocks. One guesses that, an instinctive novelist, he has either wholly made up or added a luridly dramatic colouring to these episodes and many others like them. But they read excitingly, particularly since, in the manner of American novelists, Mr Hawkes has clearly researched Alaska and the Alaskan way of life with exemplary thoroughness.
If Uncle Jack is an adventurer, then his daughter Sunny is an adventuress. If he is a story-teller, in both senses of the word, then so is she. Describing herself at one point as `a mannish maenad', she has built up her business so successfully after the mysterious death of her father that, follow- ing her motto `Heed Hedonism', she has a number of attractive `girls' working for her. But in creating this second of two fantasists, the author, it seems, has himself indulged in fantasy. Sunny is not the sort of tart that one would be likely in reality to encounter, but a man's day-dream of one.
Brought up as a boy and as tbugh and athletic as one, she surprises her lovers and clients by stripping off her masculine apparel of trousers, shirt and wind-cheater to reveal the frilly, lacy underwear of a poule de luxe. Her 'girls', recklessly libidi- nous, seem to be emanations of the same kind of masturbatory fantasy. Real tarts rarely display such a voracity for sex, any more than charwomen display a voracity for scrubbing floors. This is the one flaw in an otherwise convincing novel.
In addition to the boisterous adventures and the hardly less boisterous sex, there is also a lot of humour and wit. The wit is displayed in the often acerbic comments, Placed in Sunny's mouth, on the vagaries of human behaviour. The humour is at its most hilarious in a passage describing how an outsize feminist photographer, an appa- rent reincarnation of Sunny's now dead father, suddenly appears on the scene in her self-piloted Electra plane. Although her ample body has been hideously scarred from an encounter, similar to Uncle Jack's, With a bear, her sexual attractiveness re- mains mysteriously unimpaired. Sunny, no match for this voluble and vehement giant- ess, loses her current lover, a youth apparently suffering from satyriasis, and the majority of her 'girls' to her.
A curiosity of the book is the frequency With which characters have to submit to dental extractions. Between these extrac- tions and sexual pleasure a strong link is Posited, such as most of us have probably never experienced. One would guess that Mr Hawkes has either very bad teeth or a very seductive dentist.
There are times, in the more high-flown Passages, when an altogether too extrava- 8ant rhetoric takes over. There are also times when one wishes that Sunny would either dream less often or insist less often On telling her dreams. (Dreams in novels always serve to remind one of what Psychoanalysts have to suffer to earn their seemingly exorbitant fees.) But in its energetic mixture of death-defying adven- ture, rampant sex and vivid evocation of the desolate snow-bound wastes of Alaska, this novel is potently enjoyable.
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