In The Edge of Pleasure by Philippa Stockley (Abacus, £10.99, pp. 325, ISBN 0349115443) timing is all. Gilver Memmer is now a middle-aged wreck, his sparkling youth as a precocious painter and sartorial icon obliterated by drink, women and general Eurotrash excess. Nearing bankruptcy, he is provided, by a fortuitous fire at his Knightsbridge house, with the excuse to trade down to a former squat in Ladbroke Grove, go into hiding and evade social death. A chance meeting with delicate Alice will rudely shake them both out of the emotional torpor which has gripped them for too long, but not before Alice's sometime friend Juliette, spiky editor of the gossip magazine Rogue, has set about exacting public revenge on Gilver for a traumatic episode from her own carefully concealed past. In this, she is helped unwittingly by Hal (who has worshipped Gilver from afar since school) and the ghastly Grishers, Gilver's erstwhile gallery-owning champions from New York.

Stockley's writing and imagery are voluptuous, and (despite a mild obsession with describing skies) remain on the right side of pastiche, so that the world of art and the competing forces surrounding its composition are strikingly realised. Her teasing treatment of the novel's 'big' themes (revenge, redemption, the durability of hatred and the capacity for forgiveness) invests the book with a delicious ambiguity: that both rapist and revenger command our sympathy says much about Stockley's ability to suspend judgment and write with an admirable lack of sentimentality. And with one well-publicised episode from Ulrika Johnsson's recent publishing sensation possibly still buzzing around one's consciousness, the catalyst for half the plot may strike some readers as nothing if not propitious.

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