Early Novel in Need of Finishing Touches

Early Novel in Need of Finishing Touches

11/01/2005

Try as I might, I could not bring myself to bestow the accolades afforded it by most reviewers on Finishing Touches, an early Thomas Tessier novel recently reissued by Leisure. First published in 1986, this psychosexual romp through the decadent underbelly of London's nightlife is creepy and disturbing—and even has quite a few memorable lines that may one day become part of my ever-expanding signature file. However, it suffers from being longwinded and melodramatic. Often while reading Finishing Touches I felt as if I were reading an updated version of Edgar Allan Poe, who I will admit is not one of my favorite writers in the genre. Yet I cannot dismiss this novel out of hand, for Tessier is at times a master of the macabre, and his penchant for evoking the sensuality of sexual terror does serve to make his writing seductive.

Finishing Touches has been applauded as being an ingenious portrayal of the "greed is good," self-indulgent 1980s zeitgeist. Here, in the character of Doctor Roger Nordhaven, a prominent London based cosmetic surgeon, Tessier investigates the connection between business acumen, wealth, raw power, and sadism—or more specifically—sexual dominance. The reclusive mad scientist Nordhagen and his voluptuous assistant Lina Ravachol work their magic on the narrator, a young American doctor named Tom Sutherland. The two of them recognize in Tom a kindred spirit, albeit an unwilling one at first. Slowly, they open his mind to the darkest of sexual and sensual desires, to the point that Tom fairly easily becomes hooked on performance enhancement narcotics and, what is worse, sexual violence. And of course this hot-blooded American boy becomes addicted to Lina.

But this comes as no surprise because Tom is no stranger to indulgence. When the novel begins, he has been left a comfortable inheritance by a dead relative. He decides to use part of this money to "bum around" Europe, so to speak. Against the wishes of his parents, Sutherland takes some personal vacation time from his burgeoning medical practice to sublet a London apartment for six months. True to form, he is quickly bored with the city, so he sets out at night to discover its seedy side. He takes most of his meals in local bars, which leads to his meeting the enigmatic Dr. Roger Nordhagen, an alcoholic hermit who is nonetheless the most sought after plastic surgeon in London. Nordhagen almost immediately takes a liking to Tom, and in some of his more revealing moments, lets on that he sees Tom as a sort of understudy, someone whom he can mold into his own image so that his work can outlive him. The two pal around for much of the novel, spending vast amounts of time in bars, strip clubs, and well-hidden underground establishments that cater to every whim of the well-to-do.

Eventually Nordhagen arranges for Tom to spend an evening with his Lina, his personal assistant, and she introduces the not-so-innocent American to heights of depravity even he never dreamed possible. Their trysts become more outlandish escapades into the amoral erotic world which Nordhagen has seemingly designed. This fantasy world is ripe with some of the most horrible atrocities humans can devise, and Tom finds himself being goaded into murdering a young female stranger as part of a sex game. Because the story is told through first person, however, we see the step-by-step enticement of Tom into Nordhagen and Lina's violent fantasy world, so the story never degenerates into the polemic. Rather, it slowly leads readers to understand how a sane human being could come to rationalize both unplanned and premeditated murder, in the service of self-preservation.

Certainly, this makes for excellent dark psychological fiction, but Tessier never manages to put the finishing touches on what seems like a kernel of an idea. It seems that Nordhagen has a secret passion which makes the sexual excesses to which he introduces Tom Sutherland seem pedestrian: the good doctor has a hidden persona (a Hyde on steroids, if you will). He abducts various Londoners, enslaves them in his cellar, and puts the "finishing touches" on their imperfections by mutilating their bodies. Nordhagen comes to believe that by performing his own version of Boxing Helena, he rids his subjects of their most debilitating shortcoming—desire. In short, he takes away their methods of locomotion and speech, and by doing so, relieves them of the burdens of the limitations of human locomotion and speech. Why he does this we are never sure. Tessier makes no efforts to unlock his philosopher/madman’s psyche for the reader, and the novel suffers for this.

Tom comes to realize that Nordhagen is, to say the least, mad, and has managed to imprison him, as he has already imprisoned Lina, in his nightmare. All this being said, I must also point out that one has to get a good two-thirds of the way into Finishing Touches before the full madness of Nordhagen is introduced. This means suffering through some 180 pages of watching Tom's slow journey through Lina's sexual funhouse. While purple prose has its place in the genre, it also has its limits. The first two-thirds of Finishing Touches may titillate, but after some time it ceases to fascinate.

As one reviewer wrote, this novel "starts slowly and maintains that same pace throughout, never rising above a slow burn...." I personally have trouble seeing that as a good thing, from almost any reader's point of view. I've always had trouble with stories that were all build-up and no finish. Although I like Tessier's command of the language and philosophical bent, there was nothing in this particular novel to change my opinion of tales constructed in this slow-paced manner. To put it bluntly, I kept finding myself wondering when something—anything—would happen to further my knowledge about where the story was going. And I'm for the most part a patient reader.

While Finishing Touches is a decent study in the realistic transition from repugnance, to acceptance, to complicity, to participation in acts most would consider heinous, its ending just left me wondering if the narrator had learned anything, or that if he had, if any reader could possibly figure out what that lesson might be. I find myself giving this novel points for being a budding author's early work, and a potentially interesting one at that, but I would not recommend it to the casual reader, not only because of its adult themes and dark cynicism, but also because there are much better examples of this type of story out there (see our reviews of John Shirley, Poppy Z. Brite, Charlee Jacob, etc.). However, if you are a hardcore Tessier fan, or a rookie horror author with questions about what forms one's juvenilia might take, you may want to examine Finishing Touches as a curio. Just keep in mind that by 1986, Tessier had yet to put the finishing touches on his craft.