The Nudist Colony

by Sarah May

Reclusive millionaire Mack Velli is the owner and self-styled emperor of The Nudist Colony, a stretch of virgin rain forest that is the biggest piece of privately owned land in the world: "Jara: a four million acre dream." Velli builds a paper-making empire on migrant labour and a vision of ruling the world when it awakes to his prophesy that "by the year 2000 Brazil will be the only country in the world still able to produce paper". Ten years later Ludwig James, Velli's protégé, loving lieutenant and former overseer of Jara's "continual stream of labour" has swapped the shadows of the rainforest for the nebulous London underworld, nursing the pulp of Velli's doomed dreams and a disfiguring skin disease "unchristened by any Western tongue". When Ludwig's limo collides with Aesop Whitmore outside King's Cross station, the illiterate, expectant Hackney teenager finds himself adopted by the possessive Ludwig and drawn into London's criminal jungle:

He was given things to do, people to call, trains to ride and liked the word "protégé". But his brother said it was all wrong: there was an official word for boys like him, they were spivs. "Spiv" described the relationship without defining it, the lack of reason that made people speak of love.

Monomaniacal millionaire Mack; the diseased, obsessive and violently fond Ludwig; tenderly exploitable Aesop; Dr Achilles, Ludwig's emotionally clinical dermatologist who collects human specimens from among the dispossessed, and Douglas, the one-legged chauffeur who drives, murders and loves his wife with equal dedication--these are the gently ironic characters out of whose emotional topography Sarah May shapes the landscape of her first novel.

Plotted among the symbolic, claustrophobic debris of Victorian industrialisation, May's archetypes of late 20th century degeneration seek salvation in each other in their attempts to escape their fate as human hosts to an unnamed epidermal epidemic. She demonstrates a skill for keen characterisation through emotionally freighted dialogue and high impact metaphor. Readers who prefer stronger plotting should persist with the early ambiguities of this novel--May pulls together the momentum of this story in a plot that is weighted more successfully in its second half.

Reminiscent of Doris Lessing's surreal fantasies of urban degeneration in novels like Memoirs of a Survivor, this is an ambitious first novel that, in the words of one of its characters, "leaves its fingerprint behind". One of the most indelible impressions of The Nudist Colony is its stripping back of contemporary England to the decaying architecture of empire that underpins it. --Rachel Holmes

326 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Sarah May was born in Northumberland, England in 1972. She studied English at London University and Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

Her acclaimed first novel, The Nudist Colony (1999), was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. A bleak, menacing fable set in a violent and corrupt England, the story centres on 14-year-old Aesop and his manipulative mentor. Her second book, Spanish City (2002), is a novel set in a pleasure resort on the north-east coast of England and chronicling the evolution of pleasure across the twentieth century, for which she was jointly awarded a 2001 Amazon.co.uk Writers' Bursary. The Internationals, set in and around a Macedonian refugee camp during the 1999 Kosovo crisis, was published in 2003. Her fourth novel was The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia (2006). Her latest book is The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva (2008).

Sarah May lives in London.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

picked this up in the library some years ago and was quite enchanted by it. Hard to describe, a kind of future dystopia where a terrible skin disease runs riot, set in a stripped back London full of criminals and a strange rain forest in South America. This description doesn't do it justice. I had no idea what to expect but enjoyed it a lot, must catch up with her other novel..

[Kirsty Darbyshire]

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