Review: Neil Bartlett: Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall

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])

Swordspoint

Ellen Kushner wrote, a number of years back, what is one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels: Swordspoint. I've reviewed it, I think, a couple of times, and I happen to be in the middle of rereading it right now. Again.

The universe is a mix of Restoration/Georgian England, with a few touches of Tudor thrown in, and the satire is the bright-eyed, razor-sharp Jane Austen variety. The writing is better than fluent, and the story has enough intrigue and turns and counter-turns to make anyone happy.

But the characters! I think Alec, the abrasive, sarcastic former student with a death wish, is probably one of my all-time favorites, although as I reread the book more and more (at least once a year, probably more like two or three times) I'm coming to appreciate the level-headedness of Richard, his swordsman lover. There is something childlike about Richard, a particular brand of innocence, no matter that he quite matter-of-factly kills people for a living. He's really an amazing creation, subtly drawn and tremendously appealing.

It's also worth noting that theirs is one of two romantic relationships in the book that are not motivated by self-interest, power, and influence, and the other, between two secondary characters, is necessarily in the background. They're not a terribly romantic couple, but there is a real sense of something fundamental at the bottom of their relationship. (In fact, they never say the "L" word until the sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, which is also worth reading.)

Find a copy. Read it.

(I have to say, though, that the cover of the current edition, as apt as it may be stylistically, is somewhat misleading: while a beautiful blonde woman does play a key role, albeit largely behind the scenes, the romantic interest for Richard is Alec and only Alec.)

Update: Serendipity and Synchronicity

I just ran across this post by Ilya Somin at Volokh. The connection is that not only is a major portion of Swordspoint taken up with a trial, but the different ways the law treats the haves and have-nots is a constant throughout the story.

And the prize out of all that is this wonderful resource for fantasy writers: the Law and Magic blog.

Gay SF

I've been reading a lot of anthologies of gay speculative fiction, both fantasy and science fiction, over the past few months and I did get around to reading Chrome last night. It occurs to me that there are two distinct "subgenres" here (if I can use that term, since I can't think of a better one offhand). The first is regular fantasy and science fiction, in which the issue of sexual identity has become, since the 1970s, part of the context: it is no longer a theme in and of itself. In this subgenre, what I've seen is a reflection of the contemporary gay movement: assimilation. Same-sex attraction is treated as just another variation in human behavior, it is assumed, it is accepted. That's just where the political movement wants us to be. I think most of these are rightly considered sf first and gay lit second -- Tanya Huff's "Smoke" series, for example, or Fiona Patton's books, or Mark Anthony's "Last Rune" series -- relationships can be important in these books, but they are not the motivating force.

The other strand also assumes same-sex attraction, but the universe is built on different lines. It is a gay universe, grounded not in an identity that is "normal" by heterosexual standards, in which homosexuality is an acceptable variation of the norm, but one in which homosexuality is the norm in that it provides the baseline for the characters and the action. This is where Chrome sits.

On rereading, the book is good enough, although not one of the best science-fiction books I've read, that I'm interested in taking another look at this strand. In and of itself, it's a fairly standard adventure story, although the adventure is low-key and the focus is more on the relationship between the Chrome and the mysterious man he names "Young King Vortex." Actually, with a very little development, I think it would be a very good book, but as it is, it's a little bare-bones on milieu and character.

It got a lot of publicity as being "gay male science-fiction erotica," which is always something that bothers me a little. The "erotica" in this one is simply graphic sex, which I think is more toward pornography. I always think of "erotica" as something that works by implication, allusion, titillation, not overt description.

There are others who fit into this second strand. In some cases, it's a toss-up -- take, for example, Jim Grinsley's Kirith Kirin, in which the relationship is central, although the story line itself would work with another motivation. I think that's what separates the two strands. Today's irony: in the truly "gay" science fiction stories, it is the relationship, the love affair, that is the prime motivation, in spite of all the charges of hedonism and selfishness leveled at us. One of the key moments in Chrome is when Chrome demonstrates that he can care first about another person.

It occurs to me that the gay subgenre is a coiuntercultural phenomenon. I remember a number of this kind of story being published in the '80s and 90s (Greg Logan's This Universe of Men comes to mind, and gay vampire stories are perennial favorites), and wonder if anyone's still doing them. Time for a trip to the local gay-friendly bookstore, I guess.

Decompression

Deadline's past, reviews are submitted. Did a little shopping yesterday. Find of the week: Vlado Perlemuter Plays Ravel.

Perlemuter was a French pianist who learned Ravel's music from the master himself. Some time ago I reviewed a small book that was essentially the transcript of a a series of interviews with him originally broadcast on Radio Française, which was quite interesting (although somewhat of a puff piece). It will be interesting to hear the recordings (which include both piano concertos, which I've been looking for).





The other find was a copy of George Nader's Chrome, a more-or-less breakthrough gay science fiction novel from a number of years back. Given the way that gay has invaded sf, and also that I haven't read it in a long time, I figured I should have a copy. (Yes, that George Nader.)









For today, I really should write a review of a graphic treatment of some of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, which I may even do.













Or I may just continue with Steven Erikson's House of Chains, the fourth volume of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which I've finally permitted myself to start reading.










Or I may go my favorite hide-out, the Zoo, although it's a bit chilly today, and looks like it will be windy (but I can always find refuge at the conservatory).



Or maybe a combination.

Featured

If you look over at the sidebar, under "Featured," you'll see links to my new reviews of Shortbus and Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall. Read the reviews.


This is my third review of Ready to Catch Him, and the one in which I think I've finally gotten close to what I wanted to say. (Not that the others aren't valid, but my feeling is that if a book or other work is substantial -- and this one is -- as time goes by and it sinks into your foundations, especially if you experience it several times, your thinking gets stripped to the essentials, and then you start building a new structure to house it. My prior reviews were valid then; this one is valid now, with the additional insights provided by the film.)

It's interesting, looking back at my past reviews sometimes, particularly of those works that moved me. My first review of Glen Cook's Tyranny of the Night, for example, was really atrocious. The second, taking it in combination with Lord of the Silend Kingdom, is much more intelligent -- much closer to what I feel I should be doing in a review.

Another thing about Bartlett's book that gives me words where I didn't quite have them: it's an elegy, a memory of the loss of what we -- gay men -- once had to offer the world. Andrew Sullivan notwithstanding, I mourn the demise of "gay culture" -- it was heady, it was reckless, it was earthy and sensual, and it was the product of a kind of innocence and courage that no one else had, and no one else has still. I miss it -- I don't want to be like everyone else, and I want to live in a real world that is not completely prepackaged, and that's what we're heading for. We had something better. The mythic framework of Bartlett's novel is perfect -- we were creating myth then, and now all we have is houses, children, and SUVs.

That's quite a come-down.