ABSTRACT – RUSSELL HOBAN – ANGELICA’S GROTTO. (1999) Bloomsbury Books. Harold Klein, aged seventy-two, an art historian, becomes obsessively infatuated with Melissa, a lady who runs a mysterious pornographic website called Angelica’s Grotto. Klein, who has a heart condition, has lost the ability to control his inner voice. He tells people exactly what he thinks and often
gets beaten up and into other trouble as a result. For the first half of the novel, Klein is undergoing voluntary psychiatric evaluation, but this thread is simply abandoned later on without adding to the more general plot. Klein muses on the death of his wife, who committed suicide years before, and consoles himself by browsing through the Internet porn sites. When Angelica’s Grotto strikes him as unusually intellectual, Klein first of all downloads it pictures, and then gets turned on by a video stream in which a woman is raped in the back of a van. Klein phones the web
site owner, Melissa who invites him to meet with her to discuss why this turned him on. Klein finds that it is not Melissa who turns up, but a man called Lesley, who assumes that Klein wants to pretend to be raped in the same way as the woman in the van. Klein declines the invitation, and tricks Leslie into an arranged meeting with Melissa. It is then
clear that Klein and Melissa are using and abusing each other’s trust, but there is genuine affection between them despite this. The
story fails to convince on several levels as it’s hero seems liable to die under the intense sex he practices with Melissa, and everyone in the book seems terribly intellectual, even when working class. Hoban throws cultural references in almost randomly. Klein buys and listens to Skunk Ananzie records at one point, which hardly seems likely for his crotchety personality. Eventually Klein offers to fund Melissa’s project (she supposedly runs the porn site for academic reasons, which is never really challenged either). He auctions off a painting that fetches a million pounds. He now effectively buys Melissa and she moves in with him, but Klein objects when Lesley moves in too. When Klein tries to get Lesley to leave, a fight breaks out and Klein kills Lesley. Though he and Melissa want to dispose of the body to avoid scandal for her, they are too drunk to do anything and they fall asleep. Klein wakes up first, and stumbles off to clear his mind while Melissa sleeps in the house near the corpse. Klein is now clearly confused and thinks he has seen his deceased wife, Hannalore calling to him. Going to her, he gets run over by a bus and dies. The story ends without explaining what will now happen to Melissa. There are some fun ideas here, but mostly the story goes nowhere. The old man is made hip and trendy, while Hoban tries to intellectualise on sleaze, but ultimately nothing is really explained and everything just happens because it does, which leaves the story rather vacuous and disappointing.
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