I was a teenage porn king

Michael Turner's The Pornographer's Poem is Salinger with a strap-on. By Carrie O'Grady
  
  


The Pornographer's Poem
Michael Turner
320pp, Sceptre, £12
Buy it at BOL

The Canadian Michael Turner has a knack for titles. Just as children's books with the word "chocolate" in the title sell unusually well, Turner's three novels seduce you with their promise of grown-up delights: alcohol, debauchery, sex. Hard Core Logo , his experimental novel about a punk band of the same name, is now a movie, a radio play and a comic book; American Whiskey Bar was picked up for television; and now The Pornographer's Poem has won him huge critical acclaim and an award in British Columbia.

Happily, the book justifies its hype: it's more generous with the porn than with the poems. Turner himself has called it "The Catcher in the Rye with a strap-on", and the Salinger bit is important, for the novel is at heart a coming-of-age story. It is 1978 and the nameless narrator is 16 when an unorthodox teacher introduces him to the techniques of Super-8 film. Disillusioned and frustrated by what he sees as almost universal hypocrisy, our boy keeps only one of his projects: a blurry home movie of his swinging neighbours having sex with their dog. The short is a hit on the Vancouver underground scene and he drifts into semiprofessional porn.

We're given the pornographer's story as he tells it, complete with exaggerations, half-truths and justifications. Turner's hero will not tolerate hypocrisy, in himself or in others, yet he does things our society considers morally unjustifiable: underage porn, hard drugs, abandoning friends. How would such a man justify himself? This is the fascinating riddle that weaves in and out of the narrative. Turner sets up a vague authority figure to interrogate the narrator about his misspent life; there's no process of judgment, just questions and statements. It is up to us, and our prejudices, to work out whether this is a life worth living.

The novel is pornographic in more ways than one. The erotic scenes are offered up to us without passion: we watch from a distance, as though through a camera lens. When The Pornographer's Poem is made into a film - as it almost certainly will be - it will be closer to that other unrelenting portrait of 1970s suburban sleaze, The Ice Storm, than to Boogie Nights. Like both films, though, it has its moments of humour. Turner has an especially good time with the narrator's early adolescence, when sex is still an escape, an exploration - something to be marvelled at.

A masturbatory photo found in a neighbour's drawer provides a brilliant passage on the feelings of a child forced to acknowledge and accommodate the fact of sexuality. "I remember the moment so well," recalls the narrator, "if only because of the way the photo seemed to animate that garbage, how each item - the Vaseline, the beer sausage, the tissues, the magazines - came to life, leapt from the page, how they danced about my neighbour like something from Fantasia." Disturbing, but, like the rest of this excellent novel, somehow disturbingly true.

 

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