Food tales

In Ottoman Turkey, the indoor boy was a non-Moslem who provided sexual services for the master of a great house and in exchange might receive enlightenment, certainly education. Trade-offs of such dubious merit are the currency in this comically erotic, unbridled novel. Antony Sher introduces an antihero as offensive and compelling as Martin Amis's John Self. Leon Lipschitz is a rich, white, bi-sexual, Jewish South African, a man of decadent appetites and a self-proclaimed escapee from the three As (AIDS, apartheid, and anti-Semitism). Yes, paradise is closing down, and Leon will go to any lengths to avoid taking notice. He rarely leaves his opulent London house, and the very touch of money makes him wash his hands as compulsively as Lady Macbeth, though he has no trouble spending the funds he still gets from his white supremacist father - mostly on booze, drugs, and rent-boys. Then Leon meets Gertjie, another exile, who knows a little too much about the secret workings of South Africa's security apparatus - victim? perpetrator? - no one can establish. Gertjie is a shadow twin who will show the drug-addled Leon truths that he and his homeland have taken insane measures to deny, but only after he has become the sexual obsession both of Leon and of Leon's leftist wife. Course, daring, riddled with indelicate sex, The Indoor Boy is a savagely original work. -- from dust jacket.