Kate Grenville, I suspect, is going to be in for her share of mixed responses along with Jane Campion, Emily Brontë, and Bret Easton Ellis. Grenville’s narrator and central character, Albion Gidley Singer, is someone her readers have met before: he is the father in Lilian’s Story. As readers may remember, Albion crowns a long career of brutal patriarchal bullying in this earlier novel with the rape of his daughter Lilian, who is subsequently committed to a mental hospital.

Dark Places, which as you can now see is well named, is not a sequel to this story but rather a retelling of it from Albion’s point of view. I found it hard to understand why, having created such a character, Grenville would ever want to think about him again, much less write a whole book about him ten years later, but perhaps that’s partly the point. Lilian’s Story, published in 1985, had a feminist agenda of a particular kind. But Dark Places is a 1990s book, with the current swelling disquiet on the subject of child abuse and repressed/false memory lurking in the background, and the simpler feminist strategies and energies of the 1970s and early 1980s now complicated, diverted, abandoned or exhausted. ln Lilian’s Story, Albion was clearly – and only – the patriarchal villain, gleefully demonised by writer and readers alike. ln Dark Places, his is the voice we hear and his the dilemmas we are obliged to understand.

Not that that makes him any easier to put up with. In Lilian’s Story it isn’t entirely clear from the hallucinatory rape scene whether Lilian is ‘really’ raped by her father or whether the experience is a sort of metaphorical fantasy. In Dark Places, the scene is wholly unambiguous: she is, and it isn’t. In confirming the ‘reality’ of is episode by recounting it from Albion’s point of view, Grenville seems to be attempting simultaneously to verify and to deconstruct the simple villany of the character as he appears in Lilian’s Story. The first few chapters establish in the reader a sympathetic attitude to the character which then has to be renegotiated as he becomes progressively more appalling.

Although it takes place near the end of the book, the rape episode and Albion’s justification for it are prefigured from the beginning. He lusts after his sister (his version: she provokes him), repeatedly rapes his wife (his version: she’s playing hard to get), and observes his newborn daughter:

She shocked me, lying naked and lewd on a sheet; her cleft was swollen, pink, pursey. The women watched me, to see what I would make of this creature with its privates as shameless and swollen as a libertine’s, but I betrayed nothing.

‘Lewd’, ‘shameless’, ‘libertine’: she’s asking for it, as any fool can see. A few pages later, still a small baby, she tramples in his lap and the resulting erecting is something he assumes she’s produced on purpose.

She’s Asking For It and No Means Yes are two of his favourite lines, and as he spends most of his time either plotting or remembering sexual triumphs, he trots them out quite often. Like those two obscene old sods on French and Saunders, he pumps away compulsively at anything he perceives to be female; and the extent to which this behaviour has become detached from any human context becomes clear in a brilliantly nasty episode involving a desk lamp:

The curves and graces of the silver lady who strained to hold up my desk-lamp were a consolation to me when times were lean. I could … enjoy the comfort of her little thrusting breasts and little clenched buttocks, in the privacy of my trousers...When there was a knock at the door, I was thrown into a minute’s confusion. I was pleased it had not occurred just a few minutes before, but now I was simply a gentleman having a small adjusting fiddle with the desk lamp on his lap, and calling out ‘Come!’ to someone on the other side of the door.

In Dark Places, Grenville has set herself the task of writing about reasons why a character might be like this. Albion is presented as a product of his times; the novel is to a large degree a meditation on the nature of identity, the roles of gender and sexual behaviour in the formation of identity, and the degree to which these things might be socially determined. Albion thinks of himself mostly as two people: a hollow, nameless, permanently frightened ‘self’, and that self’s own shell and disguise: the splendid persona of Albion Gidley Singer. The only thing that can make him feel psychically healthy, ‘whole’, is sex, and that is his justification for his practice of it – even with (especially with) his own daughter: ‘Oh, the epiphany of flesh! I surrendered myself to myself, and now, as never before, my skin separated me from nothing at all. I and myself were blissfully joined ...’

The character is monstrous, but giving incestuous rape this kind of quasi-Jungian agenda seems to me to be dangerous, and not only because it’s likely to send some flak in Grenville’s direction. It’s hard to tell for sure, but I’m assuming her own position to be that of Bret Easton Ellis when he said in a Rolling Stone interview that people who were outraged with him for writing American Psycho were simply shooting the messenger.

I was outraged with him because I didn’t think it was a very good book and he didn’t deserve to get rich and famous on the strength of it. Dark Places, on the other hand, is a much better book; anyone familiar with Grenville’s work won’t be surprised by the craft of it, or by its complexity. Taking on a project with so many difficulties inherent in it, both technical and moral, must have required a great deal of courage. Readers who appreciated Lilian’s Story, of whom there are many, won’t be disappointed by Dark Places, but it will make them profoundly uncomfortable.