The Edge of Pleasure

by Philippa Stockley

Overview

Gilver Memmer, a successful and handsome artist, was always lucky. His artistic skills were spotted at an early age and his good looks made him popular with the girls. He studied at Oxford where he was admired by teachers and students alike, and by the age of twenty-eight he was rich, famous and could have any woman he wanted. His life was all glamour and extravagant parties, and even his exhibition flop in New York could not shake Gilver's confidence.

Having been fortunate and popular all his life Gilvert rarely paid attention to his financial affairs – a decade later, much to his great surprise, he finds himself out of money with nowhere live. 'On his forty-second birthday, Gilver Memmer woke up and realised he had slept for over ten years.' He does not know the name of the girl in his bed, he is broke and not many people remember that he used to be a celebrated painter. He is ready to change his life and redeem mistakes of his youth, but will this egocentric artist and dissolute womaniser be able to change? Will his friends stick around when he has no money and his fame is forgotten? Will he find a love that will conquer his promiscuous habits?

The Edge of Pleasure is Phillipa Stockley's debut novel and was first published in 2002. Stockley, a Londoner and painter herself, sets her intriguing change-of-fortune and change-of-life plot in the capital over the eighties and nineties.

Reminiscent of a young Beryl Bainbridge or Muriel Spark, The Edge of Pleasure is a stylish first novel from a wonderful writing talent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448208470
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	04/16/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	325
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Having had her first novel rejected by Faber when she was eight, Philippa Stockley worked variously and often simultaneously as a painter; a clothing-, set-, costume-, interior- and graphic-designer; a window-painter; journalist; newspaper-page-designer; editor, columnist and reviewer, before publishing her first London-set novel, The Edge of Pleasure.

She studied English at Oxford, then clothing history at the Courtauld Institute where she wrote a thesis upon costume in the novels of Fielding and Defoe, giving her an introduction to the background of her second novel, The Factory of Cunning.

Philippa Stockley has reviewed for The Sunday Telegraph and Country Life, and written for The Evening Standard, RA magazine, and Cornerstone.
Having had her first novel rejected by Faber when she was eight, Philippa Stockley worked variously and often simultaneously as a painter; a clothing-, set-, costume-, interior- and graphic-designer; a window-painter; journalist; newspaper-page-designer; editor, columnist and reviewer, before publishing her first London-set novel, The Edge of Pleasure.

She studied English at Oxford, then clothing history at the Courtauld Institute where she wrote a thesis upon costume in the novels of Fielding and Defoe, giving her an introduction to the background of her second novel, The Factory of Cunning.

Philippa Stockley has reviewed for The Sunday Telegraph and Country Life, and written for The Evening Standard, RA magazine, and Cornerstone.

Read an Excerpt

The Edge of Pleasure

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By Philippa Stockley

Harcourt Trade Publishers

ISBN: 0-15-603210-4

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Chapter One

Gilver had been precociously talented. When he was a very young child, everyone admired his skill, his ability to draw straight lines without a ruler. A painting he did (in powder paint) of a red horse when he was four aroused considerable admiration. At ten, a drawing of a cast of the Venus de Milo, the spoils from a school coach trip to a London museum, led to the opportunity to lift up Kate Seddon's pleated skirt and have a good feel.

This early connection between possession of artistic skill and the granting of sexual favours was not lost on him. With a thick mop of golden hair and a physique that soon added muscles to gangling height, his manhood was swift.

By the time he went to the Ruskin, where he spent a great deal of time drinking and f***ing interspersed with briefer periods painting and drawing, he easily consolidated the reputation of genius. The mantle was waiting. In the absence of other takers, Gilver slipped it on as if it had been put ready.

At Oxford he took up rowing to build the muscles in his legs and arms, creating a leonine body and staying power to get through exams easily without limiting his social life.

When, later, he arrived in London, after a few months' travelling on his own version of the Grand Tour, he was smugly ensconced in his talent. Everyone thought him talented and it was true, after all. He knew everybody who mattered, as far as he could tell, and everyone wanted to introduce him to everyone else.

Gilver shared a flat with his friends Harry and Max in Cornwall Gardens. They had been at Oxford together, having made friends at the Wine and Cheese Society, an excellent place to get outrageously drunk and debate cricket and girls. Gilver was the most handsome, standing a few inches over Max's clean, rich looks and a clear head over Harry, who didn't seem to mind being laughingly excused as an intellectual misfit. When there were girls around they headed straight for Gilver, who over the years benignly passed a couple on to Max. He got away with it every time. Easiness; the impression that his skin fitted so well it had been tailor-made, along with a grinning generosity and devil-may-care attitude were alluring to young women and forgivable to young men. When Max called him a lucky bastard, which he frequently did, Gilver only grinned wider, showing good teeth with a slight space at the front. He called it his Solzhenitsyn smile, although he was not absolutely sure how to spell it. No one knew how true Max's words were but they all - particularly Gilver - seemed delighted. It was logical to move in together when they headed for London. They were used to each other and there were no arguments - in Waitrose, at least.

Gilver had the best room, which was big enough to paint in. Even though the flat was at the top of the stuccoed building it didn't stop him painting large canvases that had to be manhandled down the stairs with difficulty. His first one-man show took place when he was only a year out of Oxford and it was a tremendous success. There was a piece in Harpers and photos in Tatler. A girl he had a fling with wrote him up as a bright young thing. The Evening Standard called him a young Turk. The show sold out. He was invited everywhere.

He had always valued his paintings very high on the inverted principle that no one believed you could be any good unless the price said so. In consequence, by the time he was twenty-five he was extremely wealthy with a wardrobe to demonstrate it, and moved out of Cornwall Gardens to a place of his own.

Gilver rather favoured Savile Row tailoring with a supervised twist: he had thirty suits, all skilfully hand-piqued, set off by the occasional gleam of nacre or gold in the lining, an eccentric number of buttons on the sleeve or a viciously narrow cuff to the trouser. His touches were usually but not always subtle. For the boudoir, as well as gentlemanly cashmeres in soft browns and restrained Paisleys, there was a particularly handsome dressing-gown of Thai silk brocade in imperial purple and crimson, cut from an ancient Ottoman pattern book he found in the Victoria and Albert library.

Then there were fifteen pairs of handmade shoes on custom-built trees, several pairs of kid boots, two of patent pumps, two of embroidered Kurdish slippers. Four hand-stitched cashmere evening suits each with a different rever and tone suited various kinds of parties; there were more than fifty day shirts in every weight, weave and colour, and eight evening ones, all identical. He had myriad ties in the most magnificent silks, some of them specially made for him in a pleasing jacquard called the Memmer Ripple by a small Lyon company, woven in minute thread-dyed batches. Link and stud boxes had their own compartments in his wardrobe as did a peculiar long sharkskin box containing ten pairs of evening gloves he never wore, as well as yellow suede, pigskin, and a spectacular black pair with sealskin turnbacks that always looked-dashing. Covert coats; sweeping black, charcoal and loden overcoats; breeches; Tattersall shirts, and a curious range of waistcoats (because he did not approve of them) by no means completed the town wardrobe.

Three French armoires housed this booty in a rented mews house between South Kensington and Knightsbridge. He took over the lease of the garage beneath for a considerable amount of money and turned it into a studio, connected internally by a spiral stair. Its double doors were handy for the massive works he produced.

In his twenty-eighth year a New York gallery offered him the biggest exhibition so far, a one-man show on the scale of a retrospective. Gilver rose to the challenge, unruffled by his youth, marshalling twenty canvases of enormous proportion. These were rolled and flown to New York where new-stretchers were being made to his specifications.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Edge of Pleasure by Philippa Stockley Excerpted by permission.
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Editorial Reviews

Stockley presents a stylish portrait of a formerly famous artist as a not-so-young man. Once a "gorgeous, lone, enigmatic male," with a fabulous early career, painter Gilver Memmer, now 42, has slipped into alcoholism, set aside his paintbrush for a decade and retreated into self-imposed exile from his former London social circles. Two women penetrate the realm of his near-seclusion. Alice longs to be part of his future, hoping to help him become the man he once was. But Juliette, who just happens to be Alice's best friend, is a woman from Gilver's past intent on exacting revenge for a transgression of his 15 years earlier. None of the characters is likable, but the glittering narrative exerts a strong pull. Gilver's habit of rough, narcissistic sex complicates a later "did he or didn't he" rape scenario in which Stockley wisely steers clear of the reformed-bad-boy clich . Stockley's novel (after A Factory of Cunning) revels in London's glamorous art world, but also teeters uncomfortably close to the edge of something much darker. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Handsome British bad boy Gilver Memmer was a painter of abstracts, a young, overnight sensation feted by the art world and courted by the glitterati. At 42, he wakes up with his usual hangover and yet another unfamiliar woman in his bed, but suddenly realizes how far he has fallen. His money is gone, he's a drunken wreck, and he hasn't painted anything in years, having over the course of a decade laid waste to his own prodigious talent. Can this artist be saved? The women and men drawn into Gilver's orbit continue to be captivated by his ravaged but still-compelling face and the power of his personality, despite his seemingly unbroken record of selfishness and despicable behavior. Nice Alice, venomous Juliette, and helpful Hal all play a role in this drama of one man's redemption by Stockley, the deputy editor of the Evening Standard (U.K.). A Sunday Times 2002 Book of the Year; highly recommended for literary fiction collections.-Laurie A. Cavanaugh, Brockton P.L., MA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Brazenly romantic debut about a London golden-boy artist who hits the skids but redirects his wayward life with the help of a nice girl from the neighborhood At 28, Gilver Memmer had a glittering reputation based as much on his good looks and lavish parties as on the wildly expensive paintings that made him rich. In the subsequent decade, he didn't actually paint much but assumed that the money would last forever. It didn't, and at 39 he can no longer afford his luxurious flat in a London mews. His college roommate Harry, a gay decorator half in love with Gilver and easily manipulated by him, finds the artist a dilapidated studio in Ladbroke Grove. Unused to doing things for himself, Gilver latches onto a pretty young working woman, Alice, who proceeds with astounding alacrity to help him clean his new flat for three days. She's in love with him, too, but Gilver forgets about her and spends the next two years wallowing in self-pity. Alice, meantime, learns about his spectacular past from her scary, backstabbing girlfriend Juliette, a journalist who has harbored a personal grudge against Gilver for 15 years and, just as he's about to stage a comeback, seizes the opportunity to ruin him with a vicious editorial in her scandal sheet, Rogue. British author Stockley provides all the necessary combustible elements for a devilishly entertaining narrative, including nicely salacious details of Gilver's boozy sexual escapades. In time-honored romance fashion, her darkly hubristic hero must be civilized, though American women will probably find Alice too much of a doormat. (Would an English woman really clean a strange man's apartment without asking for anything in return?) Harry, however, is atrue-blue character they can root for, and while Stockley can be catty-generally when denigrating female characters like Juliette who are ambitious and sexually driven-she is seldom glib and never dull. Repellent characters redeemed by saucy, vivid writing.

Kirkus Reviews

UK PRAISE FOR THE EDGE OF PLEASURE
"There is much to enjoy in Stockley's sly, tart mix of sex, painting and mischance, confected with a naughty, sophisticated glitter."
-DAILY MAIL

"Confident, assured and highly entertaining . . . A vividly sensual novel."-EVENING STANDARD

From the Publisher