What is it with the English and their perversions? Powdery-wigged magistrates wearing garter belts beneath their robes, members of Parliament in schoolboy uniforms asking for a good spanking ... are these people sick, or just silly?

Certainly there's an odd Monty Python charm to such antics; and if quaint British sex-deviations are your cup of tea, you may want to spend some time with Simon, the co-narrator of Barry Unsworth's dark tragicomedy, The Hide. (Unsworth, who won England's prestigious Booker Prize for his novel Sacred Hunger [1993], originally published The Hide in 1970; the current Norton release is the book's first American edition.)

Simon is a middle-aged voyeur who lives a reclusive life in a crumbling mansion with his neurotic widowed sister, Audrey. While Audrey devotes most of her time to rehearsing with an amateur theater troupe, Simon satisfies himself by creeping around in a network of tunnels he's dug across the grounds of their estate. Periodically he pops up like a gopher to peek through binoculars at the stockings of distant women. Simon innocently considers himself an ornithologist; but obviously in England, where "babes" are "birds," the term "birdwatcher" does double duty.

The view through Simon's binoculars accounts for only a portion of the book's action. Simon's narration alternates with that of Josh, a semiliterate postadolescent Gypsy who is hired by Audrey to clean up the overgrown garden. As soon as this handsome youth with "healthy" appetites is introduced into the siblings' precariously balanced world, a Hell-is-other-people scenario evolves.

Audrey develops an unsavory crush on Josh the gardener. Josh, who can barely tolerate Audrey's attentions, is himself torn between an obsessive fascination with his creepy best friend, Mortimer, and a "normal" attraction to Marion, the family's sallow teenage housekeeper. All the while, Simon watches and smolders passively, wishing they'd all just go away and leave him to his "birdwatching."

Mortimer is the book's most unexpected character, a friend from Josh's previous job as a carnival barker. With his detached intelligence and classic villian's name, Mortimer relishes experiments in pure evil. He's the kind of guy who not only proposes killing a baby bird, but talks you into doing the dirty work. It's no surprise that by the book's end, Mortimer has made his sinister presence felt throughout the house.

Unsworth's device of alternating between two narrators is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand you get more character for your buck - Simon is proper, educated, a model of English understatement, while Josh is coarse and spontaneous, with a quick eye and a simple man's pragmatic insight. But the back and forth gets tiresome, and sometimes the contrast between the two serves only to underline their artificiality.