The Cutting Room
(Canongate Books Ltd; New edition, 1 May 2003) buy

Some Secrets are best left buried.

When Glaswegian auctioneer Rilke comes across a hidden cache of violent and highly disturbing photographs from the 1950s in the attic of a house he’s clearing, he becomes obsessed with discovering whether they are authentic. Was a young woman murdered for the sexual gratification of the house’s owner, Mr McKindless, or were the photographs simply staged? Rilke’s compulsion to uncover the truth before the evidence is dispersed leads him on a journey through every strata of the city, and into encounters with decadence, deviousness and death.

An extract from The Cutting Room here as a .pdf

Louise on writing the novel:

The Cutting Room was initially suggested by a collection of anonymous erotic photographs, stranded images taken by anonymous photographers between 1830 and 1960. Photographs fascinate me. The viewer sees a frozen moment, the corner of a room, a smile long dead. Photographs tantalise. We know what they show and yetwe cannot trust what we see.

Rilke is a gay Glaswegian photographer who stumbles across a cache of pornographic photographs from the lte forties while clearing the antique stuffed house of a dead man. Do the photographs show what they seem to or are they an elaborate construct? Rilke’s empathy with the anonymous victim in these photographs, develops into an obsession which takes him on a quest through every stratum of the city: a journey into the past that leads towards the present.

Rilke is in a long line of literary antiheros. There’s a hint of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in his haunted perambulations. His compulsion to duel with corruption is sparked by a fascination that is part attraction, part repulsion. This is a dynamic that runs through much of Scottish Literature. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll embarks on the ill-fated association with the dreadful Mr Hyde in the hope that he can indulge his appetites while displacing the sin. Jame’s Hogg’s Justified Sinner, Robert Wringhim is led into all sorts of depravity by the shape shifting Gilmartin, but also by his conviction that he is one of the elect and therefore destined for Glory whatever his vice. What saves Rilke is his lack of hypocrisy. He has a self knowledge denied Jekyll and Wringhim. He’s open about his sexuality, will stick two fingers up to society when he considers it wrong, and doesn’t let pride interfere with a good time.

The Cutting Room was partly inspired by hardboiled detective fiction. Rilke is named after a poet in homage to Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s archetypal private eye. Like Marlowe Rilke is intelligent, fond of a dram and chivalrous towards women and police officers. He has his own flawed, but sincere moral code – is determined to do right, but somehow strays from the path of the righteous at every turn. Of course, as we already noted, often it’s the righteous we have to fear.

Gothic literature is yet another influence on The Cutting Room. The conventions of the gothic are pretty much the same as when Horace Walpole helped establish them in The Castle of Otranto in 1764. They persist because they work. The monumental house where Rilke is left alone sifting through the dead man’s effects, the oppressive weather, otherness, altered states, the hesitation between authenticity and fabrication are all well established elements of the gothic code. This influence is acknowledged throughout the text, sometimes obliquely, sometimes overtly as in the use of poetic extracts and names. For instance the McKinless siblings Roderick and Madeleine are named after the benighted brother and sister in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.

Rilke gives hope to forty something ugbugs everywhere. He describes himself as ‘gaunt of face and long of limb,’ bears a resemblance to Max Schrek, is nicknamed ‘the cadaver, corpse, walking dead’ by patrons of the auction house and yet he gets more action in the course of a week than many of us get in a lifetime.

Images of sex and violence are used cheaply in our society. Pictures of women’s bodies are pasted billboeard high along every Main Street in the western world advertising anything. The solving of an unnatural death is regularly early evening entertainment, and if you can throw a bit of glamour into the mix you could be onto a winner. It surprises me that I have written a book where the central construct is the sexual exploitation and possible murder of a young woman. The Cutting Room is an attempt to examine the way in which we look at women and the unchanging nature of pornography and sexual exploitation. Discussing what you abhor without reproducing it is a tightrope walk. It mattered to me that people be disturbed rather than titillated by the photographs. Whether I have succeeded is ultimately for the reader to decide.

Finally I hope that The Cutting Room is a good read. I like a novel with a twisting turning plot, the kind of book that makes you let the potatoes boil over and forget to pick the kids up from school. If I can make one person stay on the subway because they are reading one of my books, I’ll rest happy.