Nikolaj Tange Lange’s Romeo & Seahorse begins with a line that, in my mind, recalls Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca — “I just told my boyfriend I have Hepatitis C again.” And who knows, if du Maurier were still alive, perhaps she too would have written a novel set amongst the darkrooms and cruising areas of Berlin. Tange Lange’s novel is the first of his to appear in English, translated by the author himself and brought to us by the ever-reliable smut pedlars Cipher Press.
A crafty work of autofiction that mixes narrative with musings on place, love, sexuality and cinema, Romeo & Seahorse is less a gay novel and more a novel in which gayness throbs through vein and artery. As our narrator says at one point, just before shooting up, “the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his veins”.
The novel’s narrator is a Romeo in search of his own Romeo. He wanders from club to club, hook-up to hook-up, often smoking meth and imbibing GHB. His closest companion in the world is Seahorse, a huge dildo that Romeo carries around in a backpack. Just in case you hadn’t figured it out by now, Tange Lange’s work revels in transgression and his work brings to mind the novels of Dennis Cooper and the films of Bruce LaBruce, both of whom are namechecked in the book.
Where Tange Lange differs from these auteurs of the extreme is in his musings with autofiction. Often, the novel will step back from the narrative at hand and Tange Lange himself will take over. He’ll talk about his life in Copenhagen and his move to Berlin, at points he’ll meld with his own narrator or set off on a tangent about the films of Gregg Araki or the artist Mona Hatoum.
Frankly, it’s refreshing to read a book that so seriously approaches topics such as extreme sex, displacement and drug reliance with such an authoritative voice. There have been a number of nuanced works that look at the lives of gay men recently, putting the way gay men live their lives under the microscope and asking the question: why? But after reading Romeo & Seahorse you’ll wonder why those books have been so relentlessly sterile, so tastefully clean.
Romeo & Seahorse by Nikolaj Tange Lange is out now (Cipher Press, £11.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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