Helmet of Flesh

Sam Coghlan was Deputy Director and Senior Consultant of the Thames Ontario Library Service Board, Southwestern Ontario.

An orgy of blazing homosexual imagery and fantasy, Helmet of Flesh does not quite lose itself in the author’s self-indulgence. We are saved from total immersion in the first-person stream-of-consciousness flood of imagery by the author’s regular use of an omniscient narrator.

The fantasy is at once exotic and erotic. A Canadian writer, adrift in himself and in Marrakech, is caught up into a caravan across the Sahara with a retired British Colonel, his man, and a beautiful young Moroccan, Kebir. Their adventures are liberally sprinkled with homosexual encounters of a somewhat graphic, but always fantastic, sort. The journey appears to be symbolic as the first-person stream-of-consciousness narration frequently verges on, and sometimes reaches, feverishness.

The Canadian is presumably on an inner voyage of self discovery. There are periodic flashbacks to his relationship with John in Osprey Cove, Newfoundland, to whom he is returning at the novel’s end. The heat and richness of the exotic imagery make his journey somewhat interesting. The homosexual nature of the erotic content may put some readers off, but it in no way detracts from the effectiveness of the author’s creation of a fantastic inner space.