Electric Michelangelo

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Overview

Opening on the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, on the remote north-west coast of England, The Electric Michelangelo is a novel of love, loss and the art of tattooing.

In the uniquely sensuous and lyrical prose that has already become her trademark, Sarah Hall's remarkable new novel tells the story of Cy Parks, from his childhood years spent in a seaside guest house for consumptives with his mother, Reeda, to his apprenticeship as a tattoo-artist with Eliot Riley - a scraper with a reputation as a Bolshevik and a drinker to boot.

His skills acquired and a thirst for experience burning within him, Cy departs for America and the riotous world of the Coney...

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More About This Book

Overview

Opening on the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, on the remote north-west coast of England, The Electric Michelangelo is a novel of love, loss and the art of tattooing.

In the uniquely sensuous and lyrical prose that has already become her trademark, Sarah Hall's remarkable new novel tells the story of Cy Parks, from his childhood years spent in a seaside guest house for consumptives with his mother, Reeda, to his apprenticeship as a tattoo-artist with Eliot Riley - a scraper with a reputation as a Bolshevik and a drinker to boot.

His skills acquired and a thirst for experience burning within him, Cy departs for America and the riotous world of the Coney Island boardwalk, where he sets up his own business as 'The Electric Michelangelo'. In this carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak-shows, while the crest of the Edwardian amusement industry wave is breaking, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious East European immigrant and circus performer who commissions him to cover her body entirely with tattooed eyes.

Hugely atmospheric, exotic, and familiar, The Electric Michelangelo is a love story and an exquisitely rendered portrait of seaside resorts on opposite sides of the Atlantic by one of the most uniquely talented novelists of her generation.

Finalist for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Editorial Reviews

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In the 1920s, Morecambe Bay, a small English coastal town, was renowned, at least locally, for the purity and restorative powers of its air, taken regularly as a curative by the tourists who filled its hotels and restaurants. Young Cyril Parks resides there with his mother, a widow whose seaside resort becomes a haven for consumptives -- mostly men who've spent a lifetime in the mines and who now seek only a few moments of fresh air and relaxation.

From this landscape, The Electric Michelangelo, a finalist for the Booker Prize, tells the story of Cy, starting with his bleak childhood and his apprenticeship with a local tattoo artist whose capacity for drunken rages is matched only by his gift with the needle. Newly skilled, Cy departs for America and sets up shop on the Coney Island boardwalk, where he meets the enigmatic Grace, a circus performer who offers Cy his most bizarre commission yet. What transpires between them as Cy slowly transforms her entire body into a living work of art is a little like love, and new to a man who has always found contentment in solitude.

A magical pastiche of eccentric characters and colorful times, The Electric Michelangelo seduces with its detail and atmosphere. In her American debut, Hall has created a world as mesmerizing and it is unforgettable. (Holiday 2005 Selection)
Eve
‘A dazzlingly atmospheric and imaginative read.’
More Reviews (16) Fewer Reviews
Financial Times
“Her gorgeously embellished prose compels the narrative, along with the beguiling vignettes she conjures up . . . the effect is intoxicating.”
Ham and High
‘Twisted and tantalising, this is beatifully written and a worthy successor.’
Independent
‘Wildly imagined and richly written. Prose as highly-coloured as Hall’s has to be savoured’
INK Magazine
‘Hall’s sensuous and brilliant imagery does not disappoint.’
Jack Magazine
‘Hall conveys an arresting, colourful and complex world.... Even the most miniscule of nuances fanatically thought through and delivered.”
London Times
“The torrential Lawrentian flow of her prose offers many heady pleasures.”
Sunday Telegraph
‘The writing is so polished that it is hard to believe the author is only 30.’
The Guardian
‘The Electric Michelangelo is a work of unusual imaginative power and range.’
The Independent
“A vivid depiction of changing seaside culture.... A smart study of a subtle but desreputable art.”
The Lady
‘Sarah Hall’s second novel, is richly descriptive, an evocative exploration of misfits and exiles searching for a home.’
The List
‘Sarah Hall’s second book reads with all the colour, guts and flair of the 19th century tale - spinner.’
Zembla
‘The Electric Michelangelo is a pleasure to read.’
Carolyn See
Sarah Hall, author of The Electric Michelangelo (a Man Booker Prize finalist), steps right out on that dazzling wire. She has nothing to do with established writers of dignity and wisdom like Philip Roth or Gail Godwin, or with the all-too-predictable avant-garde. She's out to do something different, and for the first hundred pages or so it's blindingly swell, like Stendhal describing the Battle of Waterloo, or Jack Kerouac's description of parking cars in a crowded lot or T.E. Lawrence when he cuts loose and sends thousands of noble Arabs roaring across unknown desert sands. It's amazing work.
— The Washington Post
Susann Cokal
True art is mysterious because an overall effect is greater than the sum of individual elements. The way to read The Electric Michelangelo, then, is to put aside quibbles about plot and allow the language and imagery to sweep you up. The best moments are like this glimpse of the aurora borealis over Morecambe Bay: "It was light that had neither the impatience of fire, nor the snap of electricity, nor the fluttering sway of a candle. It was light that was nature's grace, unhurried, the slowest, seeping effulgence." Like that mysterious light, Hall's novel is to be admired for its own slow grace.
— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Hall's mellifluous coming-of-age story about an apprentice tattoo artist from the north coast of England who reinvents himself in Coney Island, N.Y., is picaresque in its sweep and lovely in its lush description. This 2004 Booker Prize finalist, Hall's second novel (after Haweswater) but first U.S. release, follows Cyril Parks from his youth in the 1910s, as he grows up the only son of the widowed proprietor of the Bayview Hotel in Morecambe, through his hard-won apprenticeship to the seedy rogue Eliot Riley, under whose exacting tutelage he becomes a skilled tattoo artist. From his benevolent mother, Reeda Parks, who puts up consumptives at her hotel, he learns not to be disgusted by the spectacle of human misery. (Reeda also performs secret abortions and campaigns for women's suffrage.) Upon Reeda and Riley's deaths, Cy takes off for America and plies his trade among the vibrant array of freak shows at Coney Island. By 1940, he meets a local Russian chess champion, Grace, and during the course of their love affair he inscribes 109 eye tattoos all over her body. Hall's writing is pure joy, especially when describing the childhood seaside shenanigans of Cy and his boy pals. Agent, Emma Parry. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Hall (Haweswater, 2003) earned a Booker nod with this picaresque tale of a tattoo artist. The story begins in the early days of the 20th century, with its hero, young Cyril Parks, trying not to look into a bowl full of mucus coughed up by one of the many consumptive guests at his mother's seaside hotel. But look he does, and so must the reader, who will be treated to visions of various watery secretions-blood, sweat and much, much worse-as the story progresses. While his author indulges in an almost childlike fascination with ordure, Cyril himself develops a more pleasant-if not quite reputable-liquid passion of his own: He embarks upon a career as a tattoo artist. Ink becomes his medium, flesh becomes his canvas and his vocation takes him from the English resort town of Morecambe all the way to Coney Island. It should go without saying that Cyril meets a variety of colorful characters, including, but not limited to, circus folk. One might suppose that, given all the oddity and jolly filth here, Hall wants to expose the light that shines in shady places, to celebrate the beauty of the weird. Sadly, she doesn't manage anything quite so interesting. Like the tattoo itself, this novel doesn't penetrate very deeply. Hall has earned comparisons to Angela Carter, but the similarities between the two authors are only superficial. Despite all the mess, there's no real menace here, no whiff of the uncanny, no arcane secrets obliquely revealed. There is a torrent of whimsy and caressingly lyrical description, but the effect of all this poetry is not enchantment; it's weariness. The characters are flat, the story travels far without ever really going anywhere and the occasional attempts tophilosophize about tattoos are generally fatuous. A lot of flash, and not much more.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780060817244
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 10/11/2005
  • Pages: 368
  • Sales rank: 851,110
  • Series: P.S. Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.30 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Sarah Hall
Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall is the author of Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, and Daughters of the North.

Biography

Sarah Hall, born in 1974, divides her time between the north of England and North Carolina. The Electric Michelangelo, her second novel, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

Author biography courtesy of HarperCollins.

Good To Know

"Well, most of the jobs I have done have galvanized the idea that I want to be doing something completely different, like writing. These include working in a meat factory on a 6 a.m. shift to the 6 p.m. shift, working in a mail-order fly-fishing outlet (I always sent out the wrong size of sedge out, making fishermen and fisherwomen all over the UK irate I'm sure), walking dogs, fitting spectacles, pulling pints of beer, and selling horrible art."

"I occasionally make things out of salvaged material, creepy Victorian shadow-box looking constructs, and am consequently quite partial to glue."

"Drivers who do not acknowledge thanks when I've let their car filter into my traffic lane make me furious. Ah, yes, and if I'm holding the door open for you, and you're a man, please don't take it from me and try to make me go in first."

"To unwind, I'm a bit of a keen fell walker (fells are mountain in the north of England). I also enjoy jumping up and down on the same spot, joyfully, like a kid. Any kind of watery expanse brings me peace and makes me feel like I'm home -- I was born and brought up right by a river and it's very likely that I haven't ever been drained properly. I'm really keen on folk art. I like frogs and peanut butter -- not together though, that wouldn't taste good."

    1. Hometown:
      Charlotte, North Carolina, USA and Carlisle, Cumbria, UK
    1. Date of Birth:
      January 6, 1974
    2. Place of Birth:
      Carlisle, Cumbria, UK
    1. Education:
      B.A., The University of Wales, Aberystwyth; M.A. in Creative Writing, St. Andrews University, Scotland

Read an Excerpt

The Electric Michelangelo

By Sarah Hall

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2005 Sarah Hall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060817240

Chapter One


Bloodlights


If the eyes could lie, his troubles might all be over. If the eyes were not such well-behaving creatures, that spent their time trying their best to convey the world and all its gore to him, good portions of life might not be so abysmal. This very moment, for instance, as he stood by the hotel window with a bucket in his hands listening to Mrs Baxter coughing her lungs up, was about to deteriorate into something nasty, he just knew it, thanks to the eyes and all their petty, nit-picking honesty. The trick of course was to not look down. The trick was to concentrate and pretend to be observing the view or counting seagulls on the sill outside. If he kept his eyes away from what he was carrying they would not go about their indiscriminating business, he would be spared the indelicacy of truth, and he would not get that nauseous feeling, his hands would not turn cold and clammy and the back of his tongue would not begin to pitch and roll.

He looked up and out to the horizon. The large, smeary bay window revealed a desolate summer scene. The tide was a long way out, further than he could see, so as far as anyone knew it was just gone for good and had left the town permanently inland. It took a lot of trust to believe the water would ever come back each day, all that distance, it seemed like an awful amount of labour for no good reason. The whole dirty, grey-shingled beach was now bare, except for one or two souls out for a stroll, and one or two hardy sunbathers, in their two-shilling-hire deck-chairs, determined to make the most of their annual holiday week away from the mills, the mines and the foundries of the north. A week to take in the bracing salty air and perhaps, if they were blessed, the sun would make a cheerful appearance and rid them of their pallor. A week to remove all the coal and metal dust and chaff and smoke from their lungs and to be a consolation for their perpetual poor health, the chest diseases they would eventually inherit and often die from, the shoddy eyesight, swollen arthritic fingers, allergies, calluses, deafness, all the squalid cousins of their trade. One way to tell you were in this town, should you ever forget where you were, should you ever go mad and begin not to recognize the obvious scenery, the hotels, the choppy water, the cheap tea rooms, pie and pea restaurants, fish and chip kiosks, the amusement arcades, and the dancehalls on the piers, one way to verify your location was to watch the way visitors breathed. There was method to it. Deliberation. They put effort into it. Their chests rose and fell like furnace bellows. So as to make the most of whatever they could snort down into them.

There was a wet cough to the left of him, prolonged, meaty, ploughing through phlegm, he felt the enamel basin being tugged from his hands and then there was the sound of spitting and throat clearing. And then another cough, not as busy as the last, but thorough. His eyes flickered, involuntarily. Do not look down, he thought. He sighed and stared outside. The trick was to concentrate and pretend he was looking out to sea for herring boats and trawlers returning from their 150-mile search, pretend his father might come in on one of them, seven years late and not dead after all, wouldnt that be a jolly thing, even though the sea was empty of boats and ebbing just now. The vessels were presently trapped outside the great bay until the tide came back in. Odd patches of dull shining water rested on the sand and shingle, barely enough to paddle through, let alone return an absent father.

Outside the sky was solidifying, he noticed, as if the windowpane had someones breath on it. A white horse was heading west across the sands with three small figures next to her, the guide had taken the blanket off the mare, the better that she be seen. As if she was a beacon. Coniston Old Man was slipping behind low cloud across the bay as the first trails of mist moved in off the Irish Sea, always the first of the Lake District fells to lose its summit to the weather. So the guide was right to uncover the horse, something was moving in fast and soon would blanket the beach and make it impossible to take direction, unless you knew the route, which few did in those thick conditions. Then youd be stranded and at the mercy of the notorious tide.

-- Grey old day, isnt it, luvvie? Not very pleasant for June.

-- It is, Mrs Baxter. Theres a haar coming in. Shall I be taking this now or will you need it again shortly do you think?

-- No, I feel a bit better, now Im cleared out, you shant be depriving me. And if I need to go again Ill try to make it to the wash room. Youre a very good boy, Cyril Parks, your mammy should be proud to have a pet like you helping her around here. Well spoken and the manners of a prince. Is it a little chilly to have the sash open today, luvvie?

The woman watched him from her chair. She resembled a piece of boiled pork, or blanched cloth, with all her colour removed. Just her mouth remained vivid, saturated by brightness, garish against her skin, and like the inside of a fruit when she spoke, red-ruined, glistening and damp.

-- Yes, Mrs Baxter, Im afraid it is. Would you like some potted shrimp? Mam made it fresh today.

-- Oh yes. That would be lovely. I do so enjoy her potted shrimp, just a touch of nutmeg, not too heavy . . .

Continues...

Excerpted from The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall Copyright © 2005 by Sarah Hall.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Reading Group Guide

An Introduction to the Novel
In Morecambe Bay, a seaside resort town in Northwest England, consumptives take the air and a bit of rest from their jobs in the mills and mines. Many stay at Bayview, a hotel run by widower Reeda Parks and her son Cyril.

Cyril is befriended by Eliot Riley who teaches him the art of tattooing. It isn't until both his mother's and Eliot's deaths that he plans to make use of his talent, and heads for America where he settles in Coney Island, Brooklyn.

In the splendor and decadence of 1930s Coney Island, Cyril becomes the Electric Michelangelo and meets his masterwork, an Eastern European circus performer, a woman who would become, at his loving and talented hands, The Lady of Many Eyes.

Sarah Hall's lyrical portrait of love, human suffering, and the art of tattooing is extraordinary.

Discussion Questions from the Publisher
1. Cyril is keenly aware of Coney Island's impending decline. Discuss tattooing in relation to the public's insatiable appetite for the new thrill, the bigger and better.

2. Hall calls the English seaside towns, "harmless, farcical, if slightly uncouth" where "things never went too far." "The Island, on the other hand was absolute consumer-driven modernism, it was in-vogue anthropomorphism, a swim through the guts and entrails of the world." (page 190) Is there still a clear division from European popular culture and American culture nowadays or not?

3. Is tattooing destructive or liberating? Why?

4. Did the book make you want to go out and get a tattoo? Did it provide you a better understanding of the reasons people get tattoos?

5. The book is as much about the world of boardwalk culture, with the carnival folks, freak shows, circus acts and resort town underbelly as it is about tattoo artists. Discuss these other elements and what they contribute in regard to the Hall's overall portrayal of humanity.

6. In your opinion, is The Electric Michelangelo a hopeful or hopeless view of human nature and relationships?

7. Why doesn't Cyril make a bold play for the love of Grace?

8. Much is left unresolved in The Electric Michelangelo. Grace and Cy's love is never consummated. We also never learn what happens to Grace. Why has Hall chosen to leave out major events in Cyril's life?

9. Hall writes of Cyril going back to Morecambe Bay and taking up his old tattoo parlor on Pedder Street at the end of the book. In your opinion, what is she saying about the art of tattooing in relation to emotional pain and suffering?

About the author
Born in Cumbria, England in 1974, Sarah Hall divides her time between North Carolina and the north of England. Her first novel, Haweswater, won The Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. The Electric Michelangelo, her second novel, and was short-listed for the prestigious Man Booker prize.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
( 7 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 7 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted September 8, 2008

    A reviewer

    Your phrase 'one of the most uniquely talented novelists' is absolutely unforgivable misuse of the English language. Something or someone is either unique or is not. There is no degree to unique. One is not most unique or quite unique or mildly unique. Unique is just that. Nothing more. It requires no adjective or superlatives. I should expect better from a publisher, an entity dealing in the buying and selling of words.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 27, 2007

    must read for any tattoo person

    this was a WONDERFUL book. i found it by accident, and am now recommending it to EVERYONE. if you have a tattoo, if you've ever considered getting a tattoo, or if you've wondered what the draw to tattooing is...this book gives you the inside look. it's an incredibly moving story and the way it's written makes the reader feel like they are a part of the action, they're watching it all happen first hand. very beautifully written! i swear that i could smell the ocean air and feel the crush of the crowds at coney island while i was reading! i was reading a bit every chance i got...a page here and there on my lunch break, till all hours of the mornings...i couldn't put it down. I LOVED this book.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 21, 2006

    Worst book...

    I have been reading for years and this is one of the worst books I have ever read. I kept asking myself...'Who cares about any of these characters' and 'why am I wasting my time?' The story never picked up for me. I believe Sarah Hall has talent, albeit misdirected.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 20, 2006

    I'm Floored.

    I consider this book to be a modern classic. It is flawless. This is the sort of writing that seems to be completely devoid of rough drafts. This is the sort of writing that seems as though it simply poured from the core of the author. Every sentence is a little masterpiece. Each page is littered with alliterations, metaphors, imagery, tastes, smells. Positively beautiful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 15, 2006

    Amazing prose . . . the best book I've read in a long time.

    The beautifully descriptive language haunted me as I read the book and I could not stop thinking about it when I wasn't reading it. The characters are so deep and intriguing -- an English tattoo artist trained by a drunk artistic genius moves to Coney Island and falls in love with a horse-riding circus performer. I haven't read anything this wonderful since Bel Canto.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 26, 2010

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 27, 2008

    No text was provided for this review.

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