In the first fifty or so pages of The Electric Michelangelo, there is little to suggest that much of Sarah Hall’s novel will be about a son and his sort-of-father. The novel certainly begins with a son, Cyril Parks, a boy who larks around with his friends whenever he can get away from the menial chores at his mother’s somewhat less than grand hotel in Morecambe Bay. His father is dead, though, a fisherman long since sunk in the treacherous coastal waters.

In the 1900s, the Lancashire resort of Morecambe offers the working classes its famous fresh sea air and an acceptable alternative to the Blackpool lights further along the Northern English coast. Hall convincingly details an Edwardian tourist trap, in all its gaudy glory, as seen through a young boy’s eyes. There are extravagant entertainments on the pier and beauty pageants at the poolside; the pier burns down one winter night, and the snow catches fire as it falls. Cy experiences a less attractive side to Morecambe Bay when he almost succumbs to quicksand. At times, his intimacy with the Morecambe scene seems greater than that with his mother - for although he loves Reeda Parks and sees her hard at work behind the bustling scenes, she remains, in several ways, mysterious to him.

Hall soon eschews the intriguing situation she sets up at the Bayview Hotel for the story of Cy’s apprenticeship to Eliot Riley, master tattoo-artist and unlikely father figure. Although he promises to see to the boy’s further education (a quirky introduction to Michelangelo is about as far as he gets), he also becomes a burden to him. Cy must fetch him from the pub or gutter, prevent him from getting into fights and generally dogsbody for him without reward. It is many months before Riley will let him near the business end of a needle with a client. Nor will he display Cy’s original designs in his shop. Yet the apprentice sticks it out, drawn to some indescribable quality in the work itself: ‘Tattooing was like being called by a siren song, or the music of the spheres, impossible to resist, impossible to explain’. There are other spheres, too, in the tattoo-artist’s calling and Hall’s effusions on the subject:

His was a position of confidentiality, a tailor cutting round the balls of society, he would fashion the essence of a person, their experiences, into quick information or codification on the body where henceforth the public could read it from them. That was it. The tattoo was a jump too far. It was implicit. It was explicit. It was utter intimacy, intimacy with the whole basic fucking, killing, loving world.

The reader who is not swept up and away at this (halfway) point might find the rest of The Electric Michelangelo hard to take. With her ceaseless flow of exquisite imagery, Hall has written more of a rhapsody than a novel - something painstakingly overwritten, punctilious in its observation of character and yet headily unbound in its conception of the heavily tattooed world, as the author strains for a pitch that is simultaneously earthy and high-flown (‘Heart after heart after red, red heart’). For Cy (and for ‘Cy’ read ‘sigh’?), those are precisely the two qualities embodied by Riley. It is both blessing and curse that he is ‘Like a tattoo on Cy’s life’. Hall strives to make a legend of him, but the centre just will not hold; she gives him a sideline in falconry, for example, which comes to little, except for a sympathetic ‘lull’, with its own ‘sense of human archaeology’, in the stormy life of the tattoo parlour. It comes as no surprise when Riley’s habitual resort to self-destructive drinking finally destroys his angelic quality as an artist; this is the denouement of an ineluctable tragedy.

The balls of society aside, Hall can be relied on to write beautifully - beautifully enough to deserve a short-listing for this year’s Man Booker Prize, at least - and some of her finest work lies in subtle, unerring descriptions of passing moments or moods, screaming details or silent visions (the fiery snow falling on Morecambe Bay; an uncanny first encounter with Riley). But The Electric Michelangelo is not a light-footed novel, and its imagery jangles heavily as it plods through the years in chronological order (Hall keeps an eye on history, letting the Wars intrude and changes in taste and society have their say). Parallels and dualities similar to Riley’s contradictory character loudly populate the second half of the novel, in which Cy, with nothing to keep him in England, finds himself stuck with ‘Morecambe’s richer, zany American relative’, Coney Island.

In this ‘throbbing, pustulous, inflamed amusement-industry boil on the backside of Brooklyn’, he quickly sets up shop as ‘The Electric Michelangelo’, his cocky boardwalk repartee and appearance (a ring in one ear, hair tied back with a black ribbon) contrasting with his essential loneliness and quiet spirit. To the end, he is an introvert who has infiltrated the ranks of extroverts. A drunken Southerner called Henry revives the memory and the dipsomaniac habits of Eliot Riley. A strong-man-turned-tattoo-artist and his equally strong companion befriend Cy with bear hugs and loud proclamations of fellowship. Another immigrant, the chess-playing, body-baring, horse-riding Grace, tells him: ‘This is America, we can all be fucking rude’. Then she adds something, as he needlessly apologises for aggravating her: ‘Sorry, sorry, he’s sorry. OK, all but Electric Michelangelo can be rude. I see it now’. All but the Electric Michelangelo - the electric ‘scribe’, whose life is abundant in colour and grand in its reach across times and places. There is a rich and generous quality to The Electric Michelangelo that its odd failings fail to mask. It deserves no less recognition than Sarah Hall’s remarkable first novel, Haweswater (2002).