Homosexuality

As a little boy, Luke Turner, like so many other little boys, was fascinated by World War Two. He used to spend hours carefully making Airfix models of warplanes, and his favorite haunt was the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, a suburb of North London. Men at War, his second book, is an attempt to explore and explain both this interest and his own sexuality (he is bisexual, with a female partner), in response to what he sees as the dominant, jingoistic attitude propagated via general British cultural discourse. He claims that we do not see those who fought as individuals, but as clipped, heroic avatars, like Captain Sir Tom Moore, who raised millions of pounds for NHS charities during the lockdowns: dignified, silent, brave.

Alice Winn’s beautifully written and engrossing debut, In Memoriam, comes hot on the heels of Tom Crewe’s debut The New Life, which followed the tortured relationship between two men at the turn of the century, and was loosely based on the life of the scholar John Addington Symonds. Winn has turned her impressively attuned eye to World War One, and two young men who fall in love at their public school (old money, military and aristocratic connections, tailcoats and buggery), before heading off to the front; the flower of their generation, doomed to die as the mechanistic future tears apart chivalric ideals, and society starts to question its very nature.

Tom Crewe’s highly accomplished debut novel, The New Life, concerns the suppression of sexual feelings, and how utopian visions can falter when they come up against cold hard reality. It begins with John Addington (closely, though not entirely, based on the nineteenth-century man of letters John Addington Symonds), fantasizing about a homosexual encounter in a London underground train. The carriage is crammed: a man is pressing his buttocks into John’s crotch; John’s excitement cannot be concealed; soon they are in the throes of passion, despite the crowds around them. It’s a claustrophobic, tense, almost nightmarish scene, executed with minute attention to detail.

When J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972 at seventy-seven, he had been director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-eight years, ever since progressive attorney general Harlan Fiske Stone had promoted the then-obscure twenty-nine-year-old Justice Department bureaucrat in 1924. With fewer than 400 agents, limited responsibilities, and a reputation badly tarnished under a corrupt previous attorney general, what was then called the Bureau of Investigation offered modest prospects. Still, the new boss set out to clean house, institute stringent hiring standards and impose a culture of science-based crime-fighting on his federal agents. One new hire in 1928 was Clyde A.

The Shards is about 600 pages long. “Should anyone even publish a 600-page novel?” asks its author Bret Easton Ellis. “I happen to believe, yes, if it’s justified.” Such books are rarely justifiable, and often, novelists become buzzed-about simply for executing them, but not many can boast that every word, scene and sentence is necessary. This is how it feels to read The Shards: not a detail is to be missed. It contains the thematic elements that run through Ellis’ oeuvre: the social lives of the wealthy, or nearly wealthy, drugs, sexuality and desperation painted over with bursts of violence. The through line that connects his work isn’t that sex and violence are taboo.