Of airships and fallen angels

VARIATIONS of hell and damnation dominate Alan Wall's first novel, Bless the Thief (Seeker & Warburg, £12.99 in UK). This stylish - and stylised - melodrama is a mixture of gothic pastiche, late Victorian decadence and the darker side of Evelyn Waugh. This is not to suggest that Wall matches or even approaches Waugh's linguistic elegance or his comedy, but some of the minor characters in Wall's sordid London arts scene are reminiscent of Waugh crossed with Henry Green.

Tom Lynch, the narrator, begins his bizarre story by recalling the death in the Hindenburg disaster of the father he never knew: "You've seen the pictures, I would imagine. As the lit seed falls to earth and the commentator starts to weep. No one's ever been sure what caused it." It becomes immediately apparent that Tom is no sentimentalists. Born in the US when his widowed, unloving American mother returned to her parents, Tom is nonetheless swiftly despatched to the Yorkshire Moors and the same English Catholic boarding school which his father had attended years before.

There, having survived some early beatings administrated by a predictably crazed priest who also teaches PE, Tom is unofficially adopted by Dr Grimshaw, the headmaster, of whom Tom recalls: "He was a tall, thin man with a residue of grey hair, about sixty years of age ... He clutched the lectern and fixed his blue eyes on us, his stare seemingly alighting on each face in turn with vivid disbelief." Grimshaw's importance to the story is immediately apparent as is the fact that Wall's talent lies in description, not narrative.

Bless the Thief is an extremely predictable, at times unintentionally funny novel and for all the book's languor and polish, Wall's characterisation is dangerously close to caricature. The women are frankly unbelievable: one is an ageing wanton, the other a haunted academic so ascetic she shuns soap. Wall's dialogue is also weak, and his mannered prose sometimes falters, as if his mind is elsewhere. However, although the intended sense of mystery is never fully created, interest is never fully lost, due mainly to the messianic, slightly ridiculous but never boring Grimshaw, a man with a saving sense of theatre.

Welcoming the new boys to the Robert Southwell School, he announces: "Don't imagine for a moment, boys, that you escape history when you come to the edge of these moors, the edge of this world." Southwell, after whom the school is named, was a 16th century English Catholic martyr and his fate helps establish the theme of retribution which runs through the narrative. Grimshaw is an obsessive given to producing long speeches about God and Shakespeare. "I liked Grimshaw," says Tom, "he was, I suspected, a little mad - and that made him interesting and alarming by turns."

Science, religion, and, especially, art and literature are Wall's central references, and the novel becomes increasingly artificial as the theme of boyhood remembered gives way to one of art history, intrigue and corruption. One of the early clues is a remark made to Grimshaw by his sister: "Patrick, what exactly have you been lecturing the boy about? The second coming, I suppose, just as you did with his father. Can't you feed him at least a few crumbs about his own life?"

If by this stage of the narrative you haven't begun smelling several rats, you are not concentrating. One of the many slightly unsatisfactory aspects of this book of secrets is Tom's lack of interest in his origins, and, indeed, in everyone and everything else. Later, when he meets the very strange people inhabiting the art world which is to become his own inner hell, he displays surprisingly little curiosity about the details of which individuals are composed. When, as a student, he was casually seduced by Donna, an older and - you've guessed it - wanton woman, he continually speculated about her age; later, however, when he is working for her brother and by then surely does know, he does not tell the reader. The same lack of interest applies to his relationship with the other older woman, brooding Rachel, the scholar who hates soap.

Early in the action Grimshaw admits he had been at the scene of the Hindenburg tragedy. All of this leads young Tom and the reader - to the moment when he is initiated into the dark art of an illustrator called Alfred Delaquay, the maker of exclusive, never to be copied, single volume editions. A cult has developed around this artist and with it a secret society of sorts. "How would I know, then, if someone is a member?" asks Tom. "Because he or she will have one of the editions," replies Grimshaw, showing him the only copy of Delaquay's version of Milton's Paradise Lost. And so Tom is recruited to the society and the reader's smile broadens.

Fallen from grace, Tom the fallen angel embarks on a path of gradual degeneration culminating - in his agreeing to produce drawings in the style of Delaquay, and these fakes are sold as originals. Retribution follows.

Not quite black enough, not quite convincing enough, Bless the Thief is an interesting curiosity which struggles with its author's lack of faith in it and a narrator who would clearly rather be elsewhere.

BRITISH poet Susan Wicks's fiction debut, The Key (Faber, £9.99 in UK), is a sharp, cautionary oddity in which Jan the narrator recalls an affair from her past in which she endured endless humiliation. Currently she is engaged in exacting revenge by humiliating a young man she has selected to fill the role she once did. This is a chilling little tale; Wicks ensures there is no sympathy for any of the protagonists, although demonstrating an effective and efficient command of prose.