Permission is a story about grief, loneliness and sadomasochism. There is a dominatrix, a submissive, and same-sex female lovers. There are spanking paddles, safe words and open-toed stilettos along with foot fetishes and rooms in which clients are led on a leash.
Or at least, that could be its extended elevator pitch. It takes a while to realise that Saskia Vogel’s quietly subversive debut novel, set on the fringes of Hollywood, is a story of domination and submission because it challenges any preconceptions you might have about BDSM in literature.
There is nothing cliched here, no Fifty Shades of corny and no signs of baroque Sadeian orgies with torture chambers and eye-watering acts. Its three central characters form a love triangle, of sorts. There is Echo, a young actress in Los Angeles who is grief-stricken after losing her father, and Orly, a dominatrix with whom Echo begins a relationship but who lives with Piggy, an older man in service to her as “houseboy”.
The narrative alternates between Echo’s and Piggy’s inner world, so we get their backstories as well as their loneliness and hunger for connection. While Piggy’s devotion to Orly is all-consuming (“I wished to serve a Goddess who takes genuine sadistic pleasure in my submission to her Will. I wanted to be in a cage of lust, to be taunted with the key that could release me. I wanted Her to render me helpless”), Echo’s grief – “the gape of loss” – is so overwhelming and well expressed that it becomes the heart of the novel.
Echo travels through its pages having half-hearted encounters with men, from no-strings sex with a musician to a night with an ambitious Hollywood agent who uses his power for sex in an unsettling scene that has shades of Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker story Cat Person.
On the whole, Vogel avoids having her characters sermonise, but in a rare moment, when Echo feels judged by an ex-girlfriend’s father, she thinks: “If there was a disease, I was not it. It was something I had contracted, born of the science that makes sense of sex through pathology, a patriarchal order that fails not only women, it fails us all.”
The result is a book about sex that is profoundly feminist. The desire for domination or submission is shown from a woman’s point of view as well as a man’s, and Vogel employs an exact emotional language. It is tender without being sentimental so that the whips and paddles become part of a modern-day story of love, loneliness and healing.
Mature and self-assured from the first line (“The hills were sleeping giants, twitching as they dreamed”) to the last, Permission is sometimes a dark, even gruelling, read. But it possesses an unshowy beauty, too, suggesting Vogel is a gleaming new talent.
• Permission by Saskia Vogel is published by Dialogue Books (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
