That Sort of Thing

After reading a novel that was very well crafted and ultimately satisfying but not quite as page-turning as I'd hoped, I picked up one by another admired author, Life Class by Pat Barker. 

Having liked Barker's spare but powerful and beautifully rendered Regeneration trilogy, about World War I soldiers and survivors, I was shocked at how pedestrian, clichéd, and almost completely lacking in verisimilitude her more recent Life Class—also a WWI story—was. Honestly, the self-absorbed-artists-in-love first half could be a Lifetime movie set in the mid-1990s with very few alterations. 

                    "For what it's worth, I think he's still very much in love with you."

                        "Then he's got a bloody funny way of showing it."

That sort of thing.

I tried to stick with it once the plot moved to the war front, where the book admittedly improved in just about every way, but the first part had wasted so much of my time—which could have been used making me care about the characters—that I just couldn't muster the interest. Anyway, the Regeneration books covered the exact same territory so much better. Why bother?

What a delicious, chocolaty pleasure to now to turn to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. I've been reading him out of order, most recently his first, The Swimming-Pool Library (which I never blogged about; let's say for the time being that it was clearly the first novel of a great author who hadn't yet come into his own, which isn't to say I didn't like it). I've just started his third, The Spell, which is my fifth and last Hollinghurst until his next one comes out.

Here one of the characters, Alex, visits an ex, who is lying out in the sun wearing a thong:

Alex loitered beside him for a minute, unable not to look, hot-faced and haggard above the sprawl of what he had lost. . . . His eyes took in the blond down on the calves darkened with sun-oil, and the slumbrous weight of the buttocks with the tongue of lycra buried between them, and the arms pointing backwards like flippers . . . . 

Then there's the "hurrying greeny-black surface of the stream." Later, Alex "felt needlessly shy, as if warned at the beginning of a party of some worrying game to be played after tea."

That sort of thing. Each word a joy.

----------

D. and I have simultaneously started watching the BBC adaptation of Holinghurst's The Line of Beauty, starring none other than Dan Stevens, who plays Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey. What's left of an Alan Hollinghurst novel without Hollinghurst's incredible language and observation? A story, some characters, relationships. Perhaps more—we've only watched the first of the three episodes. Kudos to the BBC for tackling such forthrightly gay material, even if Stevens's smiley take on what in the book is a seriously horny sex-in-the-park scene is a little too "jolly good."

Perfectly Good

I just finished A Perfectly Good Man, a novel by the gay British writer Patrick Gale, whom I discovered on one of my visits to London.

I’d previously read his book Rough Music, which I liked a lot. That one is a family story involving an adult gay son having an affair with his sister’s husband (revealed pretty early on, so this is only a semi-spoiler); his mother, who has early-stage dementia; a long-ago childhood vacation that became an incubator for parental adultery; a present-day return to the same spot, leading to a sweet and sexy love story between the gay son and a mysterious artist guy; and regular shifts in time.

A Perfectly Good Man moves back and forth even more—not only in time but also among quite a few characters. It’s another family drama, this time hinging in part on questions of faith and loss of faith, and is centered on the life of a minister, a married father of two, on the Cornwall coast, where Gale lives and most of his work seems to be set. It’s not as gay as Rough Music, but a peripheral character is a gay man, and the minister’s daughter, whose sexuality is kind of indeterminate throughout the story, ends up marrying a woman, which is nice and in fact one of the book’s pivotal events.

Gale’s strength is his mastery of structure, time, and perspective. A Perfectly Good Man (his most recent book) felt ever so slightly less compelling to get through than Rough Music, but darned if I didn’t close it pretty amazed at what he’d built and where he’d taken it. He even manages to make a unicorn reference work! (On that note, if you ask me what I thought of Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem, I’ll tell you I found it a moving invocation on a momentous occasion, but I could have done without the rainbows.)