‘Pleasure Model’ – Christopher Rowley (Tor)

‘Heavy Metal’ magazine is one of those magazines where you’re never quite sure if you can get away with looking at it while you’re with your wife. On the one hand, it’s geeky enough that you can plead a ‘Sci-Fi/Fantasy moment’ and have a quick read. On the other hand, it’s full of semi naked women (artistically drawn but still...) It’s a close call to make and you’ll always find me erring on the side of caution!
So what led me to pick up ‘Pleasure Model’ then? Anything that unashamedly classes itself as ‘Pulp’, and doesn’t take itself too seriously, will always catch my eye and get a read (especially with life leading me towards lighter reads at the moment). The cover art lays it on the line as to what you can expect to find inside and the blurb confirmed it. I was in but as it turned out, ‘Pleasure Model’ was a book that was both equal to and less than the sum of it’s parts all at the same time...

The mean streets of New York have thrown up another unsolvable crime for Detective Rook Venner to solve, if he can stay alive for long enough. Murder is a nasty business but it’s even nastier when every lead is a dead end and you know that you’re not being told the full story. Venner’s big break comes when an eye witness to the crime is discovered; the only problem is that she’s a pleasure model, an illegal gene grown human whose sole purpose is to give her owner satisfaction. Plesur is next on the murderer’s hit list and Venner’s job is to keep her safe whilst trying to solve the case. Neither of these are as easy as they look though. In the face of the awesome firepower levelled at Venner by unseen foes, the real danger may be that he is falling for his star witness...

The thing about pulp fiction is that you know exactly what you are getting with a book in this sub genre. The story may not make sense but it doesn’t really have to. What you come for is the noir atmosphere and the adrenalin rush of bullets being traded between hard bitten detectives and jaded women with a secret weakness for cops. There may be a mystery as well that will be solved by the last page...
‘Pleasure Model’ fails on this last note but seeing as it’s the opening shot in the ‘Netherworld’ trilogy then you can forgive it for keeping some of it’s tricks up it’s sleeve for later instalments in the series. What you do get though is a dark and sleazy atmosphere that oozes up from the streets and straight into the homes of the high and mighty. The reader is left in no doubt as to the nature of this tale; one part bewildering mystery and one part tentative exploration into sex and corruption. Justin Norman’s interior art adds to the atmosphere in the best possible way, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of his work...

As far as the sex and corruption go, ‘Pleasure Model’ falls somewhere in between not pulling it’s punches and coming across as strangely coy about the sexual power games that it seeks to explore. There are some fairly graphic moments but occasions that you would expect to get similar treatment are glossed over. In a book that’s only two hundred and thirty eight pages long this approach is to be expected but the result here is a book that feels like it doesn’t know what to be and doesn’t have much of a sense of purpose driving it forward. I did find it a pleasing irony though that the most sexual of all the characters was the one who was the most innocent. Rowley does well to maintain Plesur’s purity throughout the story, even if he has pulp fiction tropes on his side. Venner’s character is just that little too law abiding for his time with Plesur to ever raise the kind of questions that the book needs it to.

Any opening book in a trilogy has a lot to do in terms of setting up the plot to carry on into future books and ‘Pleasure Model’ is no different in this regard. It doesn’t quite do the job though...
While everything is set up for the sequel (questions waiting to be answered etc) there doesn’t seem to be that sense of urgency at the end to carry the reader on into the next book. The relative brevity of the book could be the issue here again although the lack of any kind of cliff hanger leaves the ending feeling a little flat.

This is rather a shame as the rest of the book leading up to this point is full of bullets, bombs and exotic weaponry that sneaks up on both the reader and the characters. While the plot is a bit too lightweight (you know what’s going to happen) you can’t deny the raw power of armed confrontation and pursuit that carries this book along like a tidal wave. There is always something happening that fills in the spaces between other things happening and you can’t help but be carried along with it.

It’s a shame then that this isn’t really enough. ‘Pleasure Model’ is an exciting enough read to pique my interest in the sequel but this is tempered by the fact that the overuse of pulp fiction tropes make this a book where you could almost write the ending yourself and have it match what’s on the last page. Maybe that’s the whole point of pulp fiction but this overreliance was a hindrance to my engaging with the book and while this didn’t kill the story for me it certainly gave it a good kicking...

Six and Three Quarters out of Ten