Jack O'Connell's novels don't fit into any easy categories; although marketed as a "novel of suspense," The Flesh Palace is almost anything but. O'Connell uses the props of crime fiction -- gangs, life in a ghetto, and so on -- but this isn't crime fiction either.
Instead, we step into a world that feels a little bit off-kilter, where a whole diner can be buried under-ground, where one of the city's gangs wears Jewish garb from talmud schools in Eastern Europe, and in which a film collector has the unexpurgated Wizard of Oz that never had a theatrical release. (Yes, I know there's no such thing). As in the previous Quinsigamond novels, O'Connell is writing about how images transform our thinking; in this case, movies affect the way we look at the world.
Unfortunately, I felt that this novel lost its way a little bit. There's some weird meta-text that I admit I can't quite get my head around. There's a German porn director (and the link to fascism is made explicit at the end) whose chief star is named Leni (as in Riefenstahl, hope I spelled that right), who produces (I think) inauthentic art. That's made pretty explicit toward the end, when it's revealed that he made some fake photos in the style of great photographer Terrence Propp, but his photo doesn't give you a sense of underlying depth.
At the same time, his protege, Jakob, is a Jewish boy who fled from Eastern Europe. Jakob needs to break free from his own gangster heritage as well as from his mentor's pornographic movie-making.
And that's all fine as far as it goes, but it's only one plot strand (and, in the end a relatively minor one). I'm having trouble relating it to the major thread. Too tired to do it now, in any case.
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