From the suggestive pose of the silhouette on the cover, and a brief flick through in which phrases like “desperate sluts” and “big tits” jumped out at me, I didn’t exactly expect much from Clinton Caward’s debut novel Love Machine. Even the blurb made me think “oh, great, a story about a down and out guy who wants to save a prostitute.” Love Machine‘s book trailer on youtube, gives much more of an accurate representation than the cover or the blurb. And yet, I still picked up the proof from work and promptly settled in with it. The strengths of Love Machine allowed me to see past my first impressions, and to find in Clinton Caward a gritty realist writing style which I look forward to reading more of in the future.

The Kings Cross circus was free and open for business every day of the year. It drew people from everywhere into this tiny postcode, stripped them back to their most basic needs, and played it out on the streets. The sex and the drink and the drugs were there for all to see, but you didn’t have to watch for long until the violence began to show itself too.

In Love Machine, Spencer is an underpaid, somewhat aimless, retail monkey in an underground sex shop in Kings Cross. The cavalcade of clientele and co-workers are colourful with innumerable quirks, kinks and fetishes, all of which Spencer has the means to fulfill. In his time away from work, he is filming a biblical epic with blow-up dolls. A chance meeting with a young prostitute, Livia, sets in motion a series of life changes causing Spencer to start question what he really wants.

Just saying Livia’s name lit something up inside me. I saw her moving under the moon and I wanted to put my arms around her and protect her from all the horrors of life, although she’d seen many more of them than I had. Like characters in a novel, we’d be happy, fixing our problems, moving toward self-revelation, culminating with her straddling me on a beach in a windstorm. But life lacked that kind of structure. It was formless and full of dark emotional things that changed shape like the weather.

While being a mildly amusing piece of ladlit, Love Machine‘s strengths lie in the portrayal of the seedier side of inner-city living; of small-time criminals, of drug dealing, of prostitution and a general unsettling and grimy vibe. It also grasps at the frustration of working a low wage job, and the brief camaraderie that comes with such careers. As Spencer spends time with his brother in the house they grew up in, the banality, dysfunction and casual violence of poorer suburbs is also adequately captured, and lends it a distinct, albeit dirty and often brutal, dignity. I think this sense comes from not trying to romanticize working class suburbia, but rather accepting it fully, faults and all. It is suburbia that offers Livia and Spencer their escape from the constant barrage of sleaze in their lives.

I took the cover from his hand to look at the pictures. I wondered what would happen after all the taboos were broken. What would excite us? Boredom was the real truth about too much pornography. What would happen when we were completely bored with everything that was streamed live through the internet twenty-four hours a day? Once we were desensitised, would the economies of the world, no longer lubricated by sexual advertising, grind to a halt?

Although there were a lot of aspects of this novel that didn’t appeal to me – particularly the idea of Spencer as the male saviour of Livia, saving her from working in the sex trade, drugs and a violent ex-boyfriend; the religious undertones which never fully took shape – but it wasn’t completely without merit. Although I imagined I was not exactly the target demographic of such a novel and a lot of it is rehashing out the same male fantasy, I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed it.