*Helmet of Flesh by Scott Symons (Dutton/NAL, 1986)

 

People (or at least people in books I read) seem to go to Morocco to misbehave and/or fall apart, and York, the Canadian hero of this book, does both.  He leaves his partner John and their quiet life in a village in Newfoundland and travels to Marrakesh, where he falls in with a very gay and dissolute group of expatriots and visitors who are taking full advantage of the readily available men and boys offering (or selling) themselves for sex.  York makes a dangerous and debauched journey out over the Atlas Mountains into the Sahara, which ends in Suddenly-Last-Summer violence and mystery.  Back in Marrakesh, York takes shelter in a queer hotel populated exclusively, it seems, by eccentrics and degenerates, has a scary visit to a sadistic sheik's isolated castle, and pursues an affair with a  decent and beautiful young Moroccan man, who he heartlessly (yet somehow poignantly) abandons when he decides to return to Canada.

Symon's writing is ambitious and intelligent, if sometimes chaotic and puzzling, but his imagistic and impressionistic prose hits more often than it misses.  This book doesn't quite hang together or amount to anything entire, and includes a fairly dreadful flashback to York's life back in quaint Newfoundland, but it's filled with captivating scenes and amusing and engaging characters,