The Hardest Thing by James Lear (2013). A review by John Cook

 

James Lear is, of course, the ‘erotic fiction’ writing pseudonym of Rupert Smith – Man’s World (2010) and Interlude (2014) both of which are workmanlike novels with some gay sex (Man’s World especially). I can only guess why Smith maintains the different names though there is probably a financial reason involved. In any case, this is the only one of his ‘Lear’ output I have read. I would not classify it as pornography as it is well written with interesting character development and a worthwhile plot that maintains interest except for a (perhaps) weak conclusion.

Yes, there is sex and plenty of it – exclusively gay. It is quite well done and uninhibited without giving the reader the feeling that they are responding to gratuitous stimulation but rather following one man’s fairly constant interest and arousal (something we either experience or remember with pleasure).

There is a plot line and it happily exploits a number of well-known gay themes including older/younger (though not exclusively so), military, gangster, crime and fraud, a road chase, S&M and blighted love with plenty of lust.

The main character is a cashiered US Marine Major Dan Stagg (got to love that name) who was tried for sexual misconduct with another Marine other ranks Sergeant. This Will was to be the love of his life but was cut short by a sniper’s bullet. Dan fits the bill physically (definitely) mentally (lost and looking for love and redemption) and of whose military training we are constantly reminded as he analyses the situations into which he wanders (or is enticed by his sizable libido). To say that Dan sees sexual possibilities in just about everything is an understatement and he certainly doesn’t present as conventional long-term commitment material.

He encounters a young man (Stirling McMahon amongst his other monikers) with a dubious background and all the appearances that Dan initially dislikes. However, the machinations of the plot cause him to see the desirable young as a potential life partner though there are difficulties and dangers that have to be experienced and endured before this emerges as a possibility.

My one very weak caveat with this yarn (as it is with much porn) is the tendency for the amazing availability of sex possibilities constantly to be found in all sorts of places and persons. There is probably nothing wrong with this as it is almost certainly a fantasy dream for a lot of gay men, and what is wrong with a spot of fantasy realisation?

There is a follow-on title to this, so I may let my curiosity and libido lead me further astray to ’Straight Up: A Dan Stagg Novel ‘.

The Fatal Tree by Jake Arnott (2017). A review by John Cook

 

I have always very much enjoyed Arnott’s past output focussing, as it does, on the criminal underworld of the 1960s and 70s (think Kray brothers). Titles include ‘The Long Firm’ (TV drama also) ‘He Kills Coppers’, ‘truecrime’ and ‘Johnny Come Home’. He is an out bisexual and his oeuvre includes ‘The Devil’s Paintbrush’ which includes an encounter between Gen Sir Hector MacDonald and the wicked Aleister Crowley. His writing is tight, the characterisations exact and his story telling engrossing while at times, very very black. The ‘crim’ titles are, however, a well researched exploration of those times and the world that surrounded all levels of criminality, both quality and underclass. He does not shy from homosexual issues.

In this most recent book, he has taken a huge leap back into the past to the 18thC but centres on the same criminal underworld. In doing so, he has endeared himself to me, but in two aspects may have offered some readers too much of a challenge. First, many readers do not come with much knowledge of criminal life in the 1700’s and certainly not at the level of organisation that created ‘as you will’ links of convenience between formal criminal justice, the heaving criminal underworld and the grey area of the ‘thief-taker’. Add into this the focus of public hanging of felons and the associated industry of pamphleteering and you have a fine old potential stew – not to mention the ‘molly houses’ frequented by gay men. Second, what complicates matters is that Arnott uses throughout the criminal argot of the time which found its way into ‘flash’ talk which via transportation and direct cockney influences informed much of Australian slang.

I confess to a long interest in Australian slang and its origins (I chased up a slang dictionary in my High School days – it might have been Sidney Baker) and I have at least 4 convict ancestors sentenced in the 1700s. The most relevant would be Ann Carey who was tried at Norwich on August 3, 1789, convicted and sentenced to transportation for seven years for stealing a variety of manchester goods. I found the slang a little off-putting initially but only occasionally had recourse to the glossary as I fell into its rhythm. Likewise I found myself identifying my GGGG Grandmother with the central female character of the book.

The fatal tree is, of course, the gallows at Tyburn from which three men, women or youths could be dispatched at a time. Anyone conversant with those times will be aware the activities and processes that surrounded executions with all the public activities included. One of these was the publication of small printed works that might touch on the life of the condemned, their crimes and any confession and remorse offered. The sale of these might be crucial to ensure a decent burial and avoiding being ‘anatomised’ by ‘doctors’. I couldn’t help thinking of how elements of this persist in modern print and video ‘journalism’.

One of the main characters who literally speaks to the reader is Billy Archer who hopes to become a true literary figure. He mixes John Gay who will write ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ which will morph into the Threepenny Opera and is the foundation of much 20thC writing and film which features underworld life.

Another key character is Edgeworth Bess or Elizabethan Lyon who is the classic young country girl who falls at the hands (?) of the heedless young country gent and who has to flee to the city (London, known at Romeville) where she has to find her way and love wherever she can. Her great love, stammering Jack Sheppard, is temporarily successful as a thief and serial escapee but must eventually meet his fate (which he hopes to avoid) while Bess follows in the footsteps of my ancestor.

There is no strong centrally developed narrative here though there is enough episodic action to keep interest up as to the fate of various characters. This is made a little more difficult by the regular shifts in narration from Bess to Billy. There is a homosexual strand involving the usual blighted search after a loving relationship which comes to its own bitter end.

If you have read any of Henry Fielding especially ‘Moll Flanders’ or ‘The Life and Death of Jonathon Wild, the Great’ you will be at least part prepared for this read.

I enjoyed this book very much as a continuation of Arnott’s themed output garnished with the colour (and smell) of a different (yet very similar) time.

Depends What you Mean by Extremist by John Safran (2017). A review by John Cook

It would seem that John Safran has been around for a long time (1997 actually) and keeps on popping into consciousness with his various films/videos/TV shows. I, for one, watch what he has to say as much to enjoy his quirky manner and directions of inquiry as for great depth – though depth is often present when he follows a line such as racism in America and reporting on the death of Richard Barrett in ‘Race Relations’ and some of the musings of the ‘Sunday Night Safran’ on Triple J with Father Bob Maguire.

If there is an indication of his increasing maturity it has to be this book. Safran takes on the confusion and puzzlement most people feel when presented a daily diet of extremist doings whether they be right wing ‘patriots’, jihadis, islamaphobes, ant-Semitics, Q Society or anarchists. He has the background, skills and experiences that enable him to move from group to group plying his usual slightly fey, inoffensive, ‘matey’? manner that enables him to get close to people normally seen as cardboard thin media stereotypes and prod gently into their background, behaviours and ultimate goals.

The confusion, I for one, experience in trying to get a grip on these groups is partly reflected in the early stages of this book as Safran meets extremist individuals and begins to burrow into their awareness. Some of these people vary from the foolishly ignorant through closed-mindedness into petty actions (ranging from public affray through to the infamous ‘tinny terrorists’) on to the genuinely dangerous and suicidally angry.

Safran manages to extract some common features from many of these individuals that focus not always on a particular issue so much as a felt need that shifts from one focus to another such as moving from Asian migration to Islamic migration. I see it in two senses. One is a driving need to be right – to have found ‘the answers’ and ‘the cure’. The other is when those answers are matched by a fear that those answers might actually be wrong and in need of modification or re-direction or admission or error. It is clear to me that the most dangerous of these individuals are those who are fundamentally most fearful, defensive and angry in this sense.

Safran sets his investigation against a mostly Melbourne setting (understandably) that it is remarkable for its very ordinariness and suburban and urban) feel. I enjoyed the story of the pig roast at the Cronulla riot ‘commemoration’ that few enough attended while no one seemed to have any idea how long the roast might take though the sausages were OK.

This is vintage Safran with a weird mixture of the serious, thoughtful, comic and bizarre that might encourage some deeper thought and consideration by readers genuinely interested in investigating this contemporary phenomenon that is a pointer towards changes and instability in so many Western nations – viz Hansonism and Trumpism.

Where else are going to find two extracts like the following ..

‘Del (a Palestinian woman working somewhat covertly in Melbourne Jewish bakery) tells me her aunty is wrapped in a paradox of her own. She’s convinced that her doctor, who is Jewish, is trying to poison her ’She’s going on and on and on. And I’m like, “Why do you see him if you think he’s poisoning you?” And she goes, “Jews are the best doctors.”

‘How could anyone who grew up with Mad magazine think that ISIS is a good idea?’

 

Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut (2013). A review by John Cook

 

Damon Galgut must have sensed Forster’s morbid alienation in taking on the task of a fictionalised biography of that author and highlights it by giving it the title of his unfinished novel of the same title. I confess I am not a great fan of Forster and have found ‘Passage to India’ the work that most typifies his (for me) tiresome hesitancy.

Oddly, I found so much more to enjoy in Galgut’s work. Yes, there is the some of the sense of painful apartness and indecision that typifies his Indian novel but Galgut manages to make Forster’s position somewhat clearer and certainly fleshes out in more interesting detail his hoped-for Indian lover Syed Ross Masood and lavishes time and energy on the bizarre and odd life he experienced at the court of the Maharajah of Dewas, Tukojirao III. All along, the inequalities of social life and sexual life for an Imperial Brit are made clear and become one of the foundations of Forster’s relationship problems. This is an interesting insight as well as a reading of the changes working their way through the emerging Indian nation at that time. Fascinating stuff – especially in the differing standards applied to his sex life in the palace with the barber. Even the tiresome Marabar caves are presented in a more interesting and understandable light.

A far more complete and engaging section of the book traces his relationship with the Egyptian tram driver Mohammed el-Adl and life in Alexandria. Once again, Galgut manages to put more colourful flesh on the bones of this doomed relationship which Forster pursued for 17 long years in the face of a mixture of love, acceptance, indifference and veiled extortion. I enjoyed the introduction and use of the poet C. V. Cavafy as something of a foil for Forster’s experiences. Whatever you can say about Forster he was always loyal to his relationships however illusory they might be. He certainly was consistent after finding his long term relationship back in England with his police constable Bob Buckingham on similar terms of sharing with another. All this reinforces our awareness of how difficult it was any gay man to create and maintain a relationship in Forster’s time, though some certainly managed it.

Once again, typical of his time, the network of financial imperatives, the impact of relatives and social requirements is highlighted in his relationship with his mother – once again loving yet claustrophobic and smothering. It makes it understandable why India might look attractive. On the other hand, Forster was free to use his energies in other literary and teaching directions and he certainly made his contribution in those respects.

For me, an enjoyable read that may have drawn me more toward an understanding of Forster.

A Second Harvest by Eli Easton (2016). A review by John Cook

The blurb had me interested in this book as it is set in a largely Mennonite/Amish community. Like most I have a degree of familiarity with this Anabaptist line of Christianity which manifests in a variety of forms ranging from fairly conventional fundamentalism to (very) determined separatism. I also had a work acquaintance from the part of the US where we usually associate with these sects (they do live elsewhere though, especially Canada in the case of the Mennonites) and he spoke of living with such communities. I also treasure my copy of the Mennonite piano concerto by Victor Davies which I regularly enjoy.

Much of the novel is a fairly convention tale – another May/December – Daddy/Boy scenario. The interest has to lie in what brings together the unlikely pair (David the older mixed dairy farmer and the ‘fierce’? party boy Christie. This is handled reasonably with David somewhat isolated and searching and Christie somewhat traumatised and redirected by an inheritance to the Lancaster county location. I cannot say the same thing for some of the plot devices which practically scream what their relevance might be – the collection of National Geographics and that jammed drawer!

It is clear what is going to happen and where the emotional hotspots are going to be – the gradual emergence of feelings and their ultimate outcome in sex and a loving relationship in a new environment (the sex is well done by this prolific female author of gay romance). There will be conflict with the local religious and general community (‘that talk’ and a bashing) and family (a daughter who is growing more outside the community and a son who is digging himself deep into the confines of fundamentalist Christianity) and it all eventuates.

The thing I found a bit out of balance was the heavy emphasis on the cooking and all those meals. While I enjoyed (vicariously) hearing about all that food (and food is the fuel of love) it seemed a bit too much and didn’t always square with this fierce party boy who just happened to have a relevant background and those recipes of dear old Aunty.

I feel that we got too much of some things in the novel and not enough of others. I am sure that the calving experience was great for bonding (and came from the immediate background and daily life of the author who lives in rural Pennsylvania) but I felt that I really wanted more from the interior of both characters. They were a little thin though not so much as the cardboard cut-out wannabe wife and Minister in training son.

Enough carping. For a basic gay romance, it is quite competently done and certainly an enjoyable read – I did like the sex.

What Belongs to You By Garth Greenwell (2016). A review by John Cook

This is the second book in the last 12 months to be acclaimed both in gay and straight literary circles as a gay lit masterpiece – perhaps they both are! I wrote a note on Hanya Yanagihara’s  ‘A Little Life’ which is on this blog. The interesting thing about the two books is their similarities yet extreme differences. Yanagihara’s is a long work of conventional prose (720 pages) set in an almost heteronormative world. At its core is a wounded person struggling with the damage incurred in his early life. Greenwell’s book is stylistically utterly different and quite short (approx. 300 pages) but with a similarly wounded character.

 

‘What Belongs to You’ is broken into three sections – ‘Mitko’, ‘A Grave’ and ‘The Pox’. Each is stylistically somewhat different though all use the contemporary notion of lost quotation marks wedded to a flow of consciousness style that is at its most extreme in the second section which is one long paragraph. Greenwell’s book is set firmly in the world of gay cruising (albeit in a very unusual and remote location – Bulgaria) with only minor elements of heteronormativity in the form of lover R (one character, Mitko, is granted a name, all others are either nameless or are represented by capital letters only). Both books, in my view, share a concern for desire and longing (a common review comment) though I would go further and argue that power issues and personal control in the contemporary gay world is central to both.

 

Section I – Mitko – concerns the narrator’s involvement with a homeless young Bulgarian man (his priyateli) of considerable attractions which narrows into an intensity of lust and desire which is only matched by his difficulty in dealing with the harsh reality of his situation.

 

Section II – The Grave – is a dramatically sudden shift from the Bulgarian High School Language class of the American narrator back to his home and dying father where we are intensely taken through the influences of his childhood and focussing particularly on his rejection by his best friend K and his father.

 

“His look entered me and settled there and has never left .. It rooted beneath memory and became my understanding of myself, my understanding and expectation.”

 

He is subjected to a triumphal and demeaning rejection by K and is reminded of his father’s words on reading his diary –

“You disgust me, he said, do you know that, you disgust me, how could you be my son?”

 

Section III – Pox – involves a final wrenched parting with Mitko, a partial resolution with his mother and a muted acceptance of his growing relationship with R. It contains a passage in which he travels by train with his newly-arrived mother and a grandmother and her grandson. I found this to be one of the most dense, beautifully written and most moving portions of the book – but there are plenty of others that have a compact beauty that is worth savouring.

 

I cannot put one of these books ahead of the other. Both troubled and uplifted me. Both can lay claim to stylistic excellence. All I can suggest, if you are interested, is to sample some of the online full reviews (if you care for them) and perhaps even dip into the online interviews of both authors. In one case, Hanya even interviews Garth!

 

 

 

 

Jews Queers Germans: A Novel by Martin Duberman (2017) . A review by John Cook

The central figure in this work of historical fiction is Count ‘Harry’ Kessler, a gay man whose extraordinary diarising life covered the period from 1880 to 1937. Kessler was born into a life of considerable privilege which only withered post WWII. His family background and education equipped him to have a broad European consciousness which was unlike many of his more narrowly nationalist contemporaries. His earlier period diaries had been assumed lost but were found in a safe (closed for 50 years) on Mallorca in 1983 and have since been published giving a view from an insider what those formative pre-WWI years were like in Germany. Several key aspects mark his contributions – he was an insider who knew practically everyone who counted in royal and political circles – he was quite the aesthete in art, music and literature and was very aware of current developments in science (dinner with Einstein) including the birth of sexual science (Magnus Hirschfeld). Finally, he was a gay man who knew of, and socialised with other key man of that time – most especially Walter Rathenau, the important industrialist and statesman assassinated in 1922.

Duberman is a well respected historian particularly of homosexual life and history. What he has attempted here is to examine what is known historically of German history from his birth to the post WWII period through the prism of Kessler’s revelations and then to humanise it by re-creating situations and dialogue. It is all rather like a film script (hint). There are so many characters touched on an situation with which an average reader will already be familiar from Kaiser Wilhelm and Prince von Eulenburg through to Ernst Röhm and Adolf Hitler.

I was already familiar with much of the factual material presented but found great interest in its contextualising which is rich indeed. I have some familiarity with the puzzle of the behaviour of gay men and Jews when confronted with the emergence of the Nazi state and Duberman’s settings were very helpful in that respect.

This is a peculiar piece of work and I think many people will learn a great deal from it both about historical events and persons made more readily available through their humanity as exposed by the Kessler material. I don’t read it as a particularly effective piece of novel writing though the characters of Kessler and Rathenau (a hard man to come to grips with) were well developed though largely without emotional feeling.