Another from Epinions.
Every once in a long while, you read a book that you may have read before, or may not have read before, but in either case, it is as though you had read it only yesterday and have sat down to find it all new again, but known. Then you know you have myth in your hand. This is the case wiith Neal Bartlett’s
Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, which I first read about ten years ago, and have read a couple of times since.
Bartlett is a well-known British playwright, director, translator, and novelist. He has told a tale, in this work, that every gay man will look at and say “Yes! I have lived that – I know those people, I know those places.” It is, if not our creation myth, perhaps the myth of how we survived – are surviving -- to come into the Promised Land.
The tale takes place in a city – by inference, London, but it needn’t necessarily be London, it needn’t be any particular city at all – and is told by a narrator who remains nameless throughout, merely an observer, an observer who is either omniscient, or makes it up as he goes along. We will call him “the Auntie,” in keeping with the spirit of the book: the characters are the Boy; O (shortened from “the Older Man”); Mother, who begins as “Madame;” the cast of regulars at The Bar (we all know The Bar – we have all been there, whatever its name, and it has had many); there is even a Father, who appears mainly through letters.
To anyone caught firmly in the real world, in real time, the characters, and their behavior, border on the bizarre, when not completely beyond the line. Auntie explains the motivations, the rationales, sometimes, because, after all, he knows. So do we all, somehow. The Boy is nineteen when he first enters The Bar, and he is beautiful: white of skin, black of hair, slim, well-muscled, dark, dark eyes, every detail perfect for what he is: the Boy. O is the most handsome man in The Bar, perhaps in the city, also pale, dark-eyed, dark-haired, muscular, a face that could have graced a statue of any hero, any king, any god. Mother is the mover, the owner of The Bar, the one who precipitates “The Great Romance of Our Time,” as Auntie calls it. We see the first meeting, when the Boy has been coming to The Bar for eleven weeks, and has worked his way through the regulars, learning from each one, and never saying “No.” Auntie takes us through the courtship, the engagement, the wedding, all filled with detail, all rich in theater, encapsulating a century of gay history from a gay perspective: Bartlett’s note at the end of the book cites fragments and reworkings of Wilde, Baron Corvo, Genet, the blues, Hollywood, and more. The narration is rich, as only a story told by someone like the Auntie could be – sets, costumes, and cast are all examined fully. There is a kind of Lucy-Ricardo-meets-Harold-Pinter humor to the story.
It is theater, but it is also a war zone, given reality by small touches, small details: Mother installs a baptismal font in the bar, kept filled with condoms, and reminds “her boys” to use them. And, with a kind of sporadic, random regularity, Auntie reports another attack on a man, usually one of The Bar’s regulars – attacks with fists, with clubs, with knives.
It is very, very hard to explain the impact of this book, except that it is myth: Bartlett makes stereotypes into archetypes; there is a resonance to events, cast through Auntie’s eyes into scenes from movies – they
are scenes from movies, whether anyone has filmed them or not; we have been these people, and we have seen them bigger than life. “Of course every year or so there is a new reigning couple, a new pair of heroes that the young men arriving look at and think,
oh, I want it to be me, I want it to be me, I want it to be me; and that is why men like them are fabulous, in the true sense of the word. Because we need them to be. When people say,
was it really like that? you want to say,
yes, and you want to say,
and it still is.” That’s the kind of reality that exists in this novel: not the humdrum, mass-produced, functional reality of daily life, but the bigger reality of real life, which is only real if we let it be, if we remember that we need more, we always need another dimension, we really
need that.
Father, who is not the Boy’s real father, dies; the Boy brings him home to die, and the three of them – the Boy, O, the Father – all know that he is there to die. And at the funeral, another side of gay reality comes out: “O held onto him, but Boy said,
don’t try to stop me from crying. Boy said,
I am not crying because he’s dead. I am crying for the life he led. And it isn’t my fault and it wasn’t his fault but I wish there was somebody to blame, if he wasn’t to blame then who was to blame, who was it, oh I want to hurt them, I want to hurt them, I want to hurt them.”
To say that this novel is a
tour de force is selling it short. I am very serious when I say that this is myth, with all the power and all the universality that implies. It is ceremony, it is ritual, it brings love, sex and death into the realm of the numinous, and it does it with the voice of an aging queen.
(Dutton, 1991 [orig. Serpent’s Tail, 1990])
