Saskia Vogel’s debut novel begins with the untimely death of the narrator’s father in a freak accident. In the wake of her bereavement, Echo, a jobbing actor and occasional life model, engages in a succession of joyless sexual encounters with men. She wonders if she might be channelling her grief for her father – “looking for him in every other man” – but her personal history suggests a more complex explanation. Echo reminisces wistfully about a lesbian affair she had while still in her teens; she recalls how, on finding out about it, her mother quipped that Echo had “never been one for the easy road”. The remark had rankled, because it seemed to imply “a stitch of judgment, a tic of abnormality, the threat of the Other to an ordered life”.
Her mood lifts when she is befriended and bewitched by a beautiful dominatrix called Orly, who takes her on as an assistant. Deliriously enthralled, Echo laments her propensity for “confusing lust, friendship, intimacy and attention”. Orly has an equally smitten live-in punter, a man in his 50s who goes by the name of Piggy; after some initial awkwardness, the trio settle into a congenial menage. Piggy and Orly’s relationship, though transactional, is not without affection: “Tenderness tempered cruelty, patience mixed with pain.” For her part, Echo approaches the fetish scene with an open mind, although there is the odd squeamish moment. “His saliva had made my feet sticky and I didn’t like the way it felt between my toes.”
Echo plies her trade in the lower tiers of the California film industry, and the controlled artlessness of Vogel’s prose stye befits this setting. There is something of the hammy intensity of made-for-TV movies in the hackneyed phrases that crop up now and then: “It was a day like any other”; “How different it all could have been”; “That sinking feeling”. This faux-naif register belies a subtle and emotionally capacious novel. Vogel’s portrayal of sexual kink is particularly refreshing: rather than pruriently gorging on catharsis, Permission foregrounds the emotional intimacy – built on constancy, trust and compassion – that can flourish in the most unconventional relationships.
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