Among Saturday’s headlines, we learn that a middle-aged man is involved in a loving relationship. That’s news? Sadly, it is, when the man is a middle manager (a.k.a. a bishop) in the Church of England and the object of his affection is another man. It’s already feeling too much information when I’m told he’s unmarried and celibate. Oh, so he’s invisibly gay? Cue big sigh of relief?
As I’m not a member of the church, and have no desire to become one – although I’ve never been known to forgo the opportunity to sing praises to the guy-in-the-sky in one of their magnificent buildings – perhaps it’s not my business. Except that this hypocritical organisation has a stake, through seats in the House of Lords, in governing my country. Wouldn’t it be nice, until such time as they are abolished, if they adhered to the laws of the land and basic human rights that permit same-sex marriage (an institution the church tends to be particularly fond of) and physical expression of love? But it seems they’d rather avoid a split from their branches overseas (including those countries in which homophobia is sanctioned by the state) than take the moral stance they’d like to claim is theirs.
As I’m not a member of the church, and have no desire to become one – although I’ve never been known to forgo the opportunity to sing praises to the guy-in-the-sky in one of their magnificent buildings – perhaps it’s not my business. Except that this hypocritical organisation has a stake, through seats in the House of Lords, in governing my country. Wouldn’t it be nice, until such time as they are abolished, if they adhered to the laws of the land and basic human rights that permit same-sex marriage (an institution the church tends to be particularly fond of) and physical expression of love? But it seems they’d rather avoid a split from their branches overseas (including those countries in which homophobia is sanctioned by the state) than take the moral stance they’d like to claim is theirs.
| In this context, the role of art and literature in counteracting the silencing and marginalisation of homosexual people garners more importance. So I’m proud to have written a novel that has made the Polari First Book Prize shortlist and to include LGBT novels in my reading and reviews. Here are a couple more, which focus particularly on gay men and boys who pay, and are paid, for sex, the first set in a relatively recent Bulgaria and the second in Iceland almost a century ago. I’m hoping the bishop’s love life is more straightforward than those portrayed in these short novels. |  |
An American teacher of literature at a college in Sofia goes cruising in a public toilet in the basement of the National Palace of Culture where he meets, and becomes infatuated with, a younger Bulgarian called Mitko. Initially, this unnamed narrator comes across as unsympathetic, accusing Mitko – at least on the page – of betrayal, without seeming to sufficiently acknowledge the dynamics of an unequal relationship in which one man pays another for sex. But as the short novel progresses, the risks of attachment to vulnerable people – the challenge of negotiating the precarious boundary between compassion and self-preservation – becomes more apparent, along with the character traits – rooted in a loveless childhood – that might have led our narrator to form attachments with people he is unable to trust.
While foregrounding the LGBT experience, with some frank depictions of gay sex, What Belongs to You is about the complexity of desire of any nature, and the shame that ensues when what we want feels, at some fundamental level, wrong. A later scene, in which the narrator, on a train journey with his mother, observes the interactions between a securely-attached little boy and his grandmother, is particularly poignant. It is a novel about the inner homelessness that leads to rootlessness and self-imposed exile (something explored in my own forthcoming novel, Underneath), the external experience of being lost mirroring the internal (p145):
I hoped I would feel new in a new country, but I wasn’t new here, and if there was a comfort in the idea that my habitual unease had a cause, that if I was ill-fitted to the place there was a good reason, it was a false comfort, a way of running away from real remedy. But then I didn’t truly believe there was a remedy.
This sense of alienation is also reflected in the narrator’s struggles with the Bulgarian language, which proves particularly humiliating when he needs to attend an STD clinic.
Poetically written, with much self-reflection that becomes progressively more insightful, What Belongs to You reads like a fictional memoir, but questions how much we can never know another person or, indeed, ourselves (p190):
these were only my own thoughts, I knew, they brought me no nearer to him, this man I had in some sense loved and who had never in the years I had known him been anything but alien to me.
In the UK, it’s published by Picador, from whom I received my review copy.
While foregrounding the LGBT experience, with some frank depictions of gay sex, What Belongs to You is about the complexity of desire of any nature, and the shame that ensues when what we want feels, at some fundamental level, wrong. A later scene, in which the narrator, on a train journey with his mother, observes the interactions between a securely-attached little boy and his grandmother, is particularly poignant. It is a novel about the inner homelessness that leads to rootlessness and self-imposed exile (something explored in my own forthcoming novel, Underneath), the external experience of being lost mirroring the internal (p145):
I hoped I would feel new in a new country, but I wasn’t new here, and if there was a comfort in the idea that my habitual unease had a cause, that if I was ill-fitted to the place there was a good reason, it was a false comfort, a way of running away from real remedy. But then I didn’t truly believe there was a remedy.
This sense of alienation is also reflected in the narrator’s struggles with the Bulgarian language, which proves particularly humiliating when he needs to attend an STD clinic.
Poetically written, with much self-reflection that becomes progressively more insightful, What Belongs to You reads like a fictional memoir, but questions how much we can never know another person or, indeed, ourselves (p190):
these were only my own thoughts, I knew, they brought me no nearer to him, this man I had in some sense loved and who had never in the years I had known him been anything but alien to me.
In the UK, it’s published by Picador, from whom I received my review copy.
Orphaned and dyslexic, and having completed his schooling at the age of twelve, sixteen-year-old Máni Steinn (the eponymous Moonstone) lives on the fringes of society in 1918 Reykjavik. His dreams are coloured by his obsession with the silver screen, and he earns the price of his admission ticket through sexual services to the city’s gentry and visiting sailors. We first encounter him with a mouthful of gentleman’s penis, listening to the roar of rich-girl Sóla’s motorbike as people take to the streets to watch an erupting volcano. A shortage of coal also makes people flock to the cinema, as much for the warmth as the spectacle, and the perfect breeding ground for the Spanish flu when it arrives in the port. Along with Sóla, Máni is conscripted into assisting the doctor in separating the dead from the dying but, although he clearly admires her, Máni’s sexual preference is for men. When, on the day of Iceland’s independence from Denmark, Máni is caught in flagrante with a sailor, the authorities, afraid that the (p118):
last thing people want to see at the dawn of the Icelandic sovereign state are headlines in the domestic or Danish press about a sodomy scandal in Reykjavik
they conspire to erase all evidence of the boy’s existence.
The bones of a fabulous story but, unless you’re passionate about Icelandic history or silent movies, or you’re among the worthies who have lauded this author’s writing, you might be a little disappointed at the sparse flesh with which he is minded to clothe them. At 142 pages, interleaved with a lot of white space, it’s more of an extended short story than a novel. Given the Icelandic naming system, whereby people’s second names identify them as so-and-so’s son or daughter, the boy’s name underlines his lack of a father, but we don’t learn, unless I missed it, the significance of Moon Stone (which I imagine must have some significance when bestowed by an author who, like his compatriot, Björk, with whom he’s collaborated on lyrics, chooses to go by a single name).
Apart from his dreams, which, if you’re so inclined could be subject to analysis, we get only glimpses into the boy’s mind, but we can assume, from his sketched personal history, that it’s bleak. When collecting bodies at the height of the epidemic, we are told that “Reykjavik has, for the first time, assumed a form that reflects his inner life” (p92).
Published in Iceland in 2013, and translated into English by Victoria Cribb, Moonstone is subtitled “the boy who never was” and published in the UK by Sceptre to whom thanks for my review copy.
last thing people want to see at the dawn of the Icelandic sovereign state are headlines in the domestic or Danish press about a sodomy scandal in Reykjavik
they conspire to erase all evidence of the boy’s existence.
The bones of a fabulous story but, unless you’re passionate about Icelandic history or silent movies, or you’re among the worthies who have lauded this author’s writing, you might be a little disappointed at the sparse flesh with which he is minded to clothe them. At 142 pages, interleaved with a lot of white space, it’s more of an extended short story than a novel. Given the Icelandic naming system, whereby people’s second names identify them as so-and-so’s son or daughter, the boy’s name underlines his lack of a father, but we don’t learn, unless I missed it, the significance of Moon Stone (which I imagine must have some significance when bestowed by an author who, like his compatriot, Björk, with whom he’s collaborated on lyrics, chooses to go by a single name).
Apart from his dreams, which, if you’re so inclined could be subject to analysis, we get only glimpses into the boy’s mind, but we can assume, from his sketched personal history, that it’s bleak. When collecting bodies at the height of the epidemic, we are told that “Reykjavik has, for the first time, assumed a form that reflects his inner life” (p92).
Published in Iceland in 2013, and translated into English by Victoria Cribb, Moonstone is subtitled “the boy who never was” and published in the UK by Sceptre to whom thanks for my review copy.
RSS Feed
