I RAN INTO LUKE SUTHERLAND at the monthly Book Slam @ Cherry Jam, a chilled literary evening in northwest London where authors, musicians and djs tend the souls of a Monday crowd still a mite mashed from the weekend. In the midst of the launch for his third novel Venus as a Boy and various musical commitments Luke had also found time organise his own night, a fantastic line-up including Iain Sinclair, poet Brian Catling, and of course Luke himself giving several memorised readings from his novel. Given this clear bid to win the title of busiest man in the world, I was pleasantly surprised when, after I'd buttonholed him, struggling to compete with Marlene Shaw's soaring California Soul, he agreed forthwith. I had been somewhat unsure of the reception I would get. Those familiar with Venus as a Boy will understand that this wouldn't have been the first time Sutherland had turned down a stranger with a personal request.

It turns out that Luke is much more approachable than the opening of his new novel would suggest. We meet up at Angel tube station on a sunny-wet Sunday afternoon in April, and cross by the green to ensconce ourselves in a reasonably secluded café corner. We begin by talking about the Book Slam just gone and it soon becomes clear that we both harbour a strong admiration for London author Iain Sinclair. Finally managing to untangle my microphone I suggest that Sinclair opening his reading with the line, 'This is not my place'�, a reference to his assumed distrust of the territory beyond his beloved East End, seems quite a neat way of summing up the scope of that evening: authors from disparate backgrounds and age groups, yet at the same time bound, out here in the non-space of London's Westway, by a common notion of being in some way dislocated from where they're from. I wonder aloud whether Luke agrees that this idea is pretty close to the heart of Venus as a Boy.

'When Patrick (Neate, Book Slam organiser and author of Whitbread winner Twelve Bar Blues) offered me a spot at Book Slam, Iain Sinclair was the first person I asked. Lights Out for the Territory was my first port of call with him. When I first came to London, I'd come here from wide open spaces, places like Orkney, with all these sacred sites that are as much a part of the landscape as the contemporary shops and houses and so on, and I missed that when I came to London because they were all covered up.

'I thought Lights Out for the Territory was just the most fantastic book. The conceit that blew me away first and foremost was the way in which it peels back the layers of the city, shows you where all the sacred sights are, and the connections between them, the resonance of these places. He shows you the effect they have both metaphysically and physically upon the life of the city. London's been described as having manifold and perpetual presence, which makes a mockery of ideas of spatial temporality.

Everything that has ever happened, will happen, is happening. Everything is happening at once. I think his (Sinclair's) city is wonderfully chaotic, quantum in that respect. Suddenly the landscape of London became as magical as that of Orkney. That was the draw. He writes in a very unashamed way about aspects of the city that require more from your intuition than anything else. He belittles the idea of empiricism. It's absolutely fantastical, and leads to the magical.'�

This profound connection between language, history and landscape feeds directly into Luke Sutherland's evocation of Orkney in Venus as a Boy. The Orcades are commonly associated with incredible barrenness (a preconception Luke draws attention to in the novel: 'the first thing people notice about the Islands is that there are no trees'�), perhaps the odd barrow dotted here and there. Yet from it he derives so much poetry, drawing in landscape, mythology, history and emptiness. I ask whether there is a sense in which this is a symptom of the dislocation that I brought up at the beginning? Perhaps a case of language coming to replace the unattainable space of origin? Luke kindly rebuffs such an interpretation:

'That's a good question. Language replacing the space?No, I don't think it does. But, as regards the space, I always try to make my language as descriptive as possible. Not prescriptive. That's one of the problems that I think faces us today, especially in a modern capitalist culture. The language we use to describe the world around us is seen as being absolute. The words are the things they're supposed to stand for. One of the consequences of that is it gives rise to all sorts of constructs which are in essence fictional, and based on certain anxieties we have about our contingency. It's one of the great gifts of the Enlightenment. This is one of the things I love about Iain Sinclair. His writing about London is descriptive, not prescriptive: rather than drawing a boundary around the city, he instead releases it.'�

The connection between the sacred spaces of Orkney and the hidden myths of London resounds through Venus as a Boy. Its transgendered hero Desirée at one point makes an almost Christlike pilgrimage of the old churches of London, almost as though he's looking for these cultural points of connection: between the great Orcadian burial mounds, and these churches in London.

'I was trying to transplant what Desirée found captivating and life-affirming, and I mean that in its most literal sense, about Orkney. He's trying to find it here in London. So in all the places he visits. St. Andrew's church; the Walbrook; the Millennium Bridge; Ludgate Hill and Cornhill - the two hills around which the city first grew - he's trying to transplant how he felt about the resonant spaces in Orkney: the standing stones of of Brodgar, Maeshowe and the sea itself, into London. To establish some co-ordinates, whether they be existential or physical. His walk that night is his trying to find himself again.'�

In the Prologue to Sutherland's novel, he recounts the means by which he came into possession of Desirée's story: Pascal, a skinhead with eyeliner, approaches him after a gig with a message from friend who is dying. A friend who claims to know Luke from Orkney. Luke declines the offer and a tussle ensues. A week later a box of numbered recordings arrives with other assorted personal items. Desirée is dead. It would be presumptuous to ask the obvious question, yet it is too intriguing to bypass the author's views about the blend of art and reality in the novel.

'I don't want to go into too much detail about that. Though, as you can imagine that was a huge springboard, and it changes everything about the story. The offer of the story, for me, is as a plea for forgiveness. My role - in this sense - in the story is very small, but it makes absolute sense in terms of the author's note, and sense of the end-point of the story. So, the author's note? All I'll say is that it's not 'pure' fiction.'�

The idea of Venus as a Boy being a plea for forgiveness is linked to Sutherland's childhood in Orkney. Being black, adopted by white parents, and having black, white and mixed race siblings would have raised a few eyebrows pretty much anywhere in the mid-1970s, however, the insular Orcadian community into which his family moved in 1976 turned out to be particularly hostile. 'As the oldest of the adopted kids, I ran all the big social gauntlets first, the primary school, the high school. Obviously, I was bullied.'� In Venus as a Boy it transpires that white, bisexual Desirée acquiesced in the author's persecution - a cameo role in the novel sees a black child forced to humiliate himself before a baying mob - in entrusting his story to Luke, he is gambling on his absolution. Where many writers would address such racial prejudice in a straightforward, firsthand way, Sutherland approaches the issue from a much higher vantage point. Venus as a Boy operates on a level where all 'fixed' poles identity, be they race, gender or sexuality, are subject to analysis.

'I don't have absolute views about race, culture and gender. This is something that helped me to survive in Orkney. I had to create a context for myself and I did that through reading. Reading about Orkney, about its myths and legends, then going from that to wider myths and legends; Greek and Norse. I read the lyrics of a lot of indigenous poetry. Very quickly all this became connected with this magical landscape that I describe in the book, and my perceptions of race, nationality, culture, sexuality, absolutely disintegrated. The idea of these things being black and white fell apart, and I came to see the world as much more chaotic than that, riddled with our contingency and idiosyncrasy. This feeds into the way we use language to describe the world around us which can often be very reductive. I hope that the book goes against that idea. It presents a very un-absolute and un-didactic world view.'�

Desirée's sycophantic racism drives away the only real love of his life, and precipitates his flight to the brothels of London where he spends the rest of his days catering for lowlife and the downright evil. It's a poignant irony in the novel that as Desirée's racial prejudices result in this downfall, so in a rather beautiful way at the end of the novel, it is his own skin that changes colour: white to gold. This is ostensibly a result of a hormone overdose, but also suggests a symbolic sort of redemption? The question is whether Sutherland feels Desirée has been forgiven?

'Ultimately I do. The fulcrum around which the story turns is the point at which Desirée falls out with Tracy for taking the piss out of me. That's the point at which his life takes a wholly different trajectory. That could never have been made any more a fuss of in the book than it was. I think to have made more of it would have made the book didactic in ways that I'm just not at all comfortable with. To talk about race and racism at a remove was right.

'Desirée's metamorphosis I see as being a gift for the goodness he's been able to bring to others. If you like it is a gift from God, proof of his divinity if you will. His becoming a woman reflects the relationships that Desirée has had with men in the past which have been charged with brutality. By the end of the story these cycles of violence that continually repeat themselves are no longer borne out of self-esteem. They become the sufferings of a saint. His physical metamorphosis, into a woman, is a negation of that side of himself. He is leaving them behind.'�

The unmistakably religious subtext to Venus has its roots less in conventional Christianity than the Gnostic heresies of the first two centuries AD. Gnosticism was the main religious rival to orthodox Christianity up until 300 AD, and teaches that the universe is split between a degraded material 'reality' and a divine spirit. for Gnostics , only those possessed with the spark of divine knowledge ('gnosis') will be liberated and reunited with the pure spirit. For Desirée, introduced to the concept by a friend, Gnosticism becomes a way of understanding his own gift or 'spark'. Able to make people experience the sort of sex that has them seeing choirs of angels and orchards in the heavens, he becomes a conduit for his clients - criminals, bigots, truly those most in need - for that momentary glimpse of redemption. In a curious inversion of the Gnostic tenets, Sutherland's novel describes an attaining of heaven not by the denial of the material body, but through it. 'This idea of a knowledge of the self and a knowledge of the divine goes all the way through the book. Importantly, Desirée says 'knowledge of me for other people is, for them, a knowledge of the divine. I am a gateway to heaven.''�

But there is of course also a sense in which Desirée's life has descended into terrible tragedy, that this spark, this divine gift has been ultimately wasted on those who least deserved it?

'Has Desirée had a wasted life. In the end I don't think he did, I think if you take the story on its own terms then definitely not. If you believe Desirée, he bought joy to bad people, and did give them a glimpse of heaven. And now that the story is out there, now he has had my endorsement in this form, then no, he's absolutely succeeded. He's got my forgiveness, and he's got the story out there, which is what he always wanted. So a wasted life? No, emphatically not, and time will hopefully bear that out. And that's me talking as Desirée. This isn't me 'the delusional author', this is me speaking from Desirée's point of view and what I suppose Desirée would think.'�
At the end of the novel, Desirée, a preoperative transsexual, a queen - a saviour? - lies contemplating the end, slowly turning into an angel. What sort of heaven awaits Desiree?

'The tragedy of the book is that he never knows. By the time Desirée is dead, I've already said no to Pascale, and the offer of writing Desirée's biography. It never comes to him. It's down to everyone who reads the book to decide whether he's redeemed. He asks that question at the very end. He says, 'I keep thinking of Enoch and how God took him back up to heaven after only 365 years on the earth', (when everyone else, including Enoch's son Methuselah was living well into the 900s) because God didn't want his favourite walking among the sinners. And he says, 'I wonder when I get up there, will I be able to see what's going on down here.' And one has to hope that he can.

Slowly the sun breaks through a cloud and reality coalesces back into a typical Sunday afternoon. We pay our bill and head off to try and find somewhere to take photographs. In minutes we are weaving between intrigued tourists and dodging crotchety shoppers laden with schmatter. Sutherland politely shooes the punters along. I find myself tarrying with these notions of heaven and redemption. Perhaps there is such a thing as an afterlife after all - one where one's 'spiritual presence' hovers as a trace of memory in those who've forgiven or forsaken you. This being so, could we conceive of this novel as itself a type of heaven? Heading down the escalator at the tube station it strikes me that heaven always sounded like a good story.


Venus as a Boy is published by Bloomsbury.

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