Erotic sketches, a blackmail letter, a closeted aristocrat, and a sacrificial murder. All laced with love, betrayal, deception and vengeance in Regency London.
It’s London 1810. George Rowlands is a poor artist working as a scene painter in the Theatre. When George meets the charismatic Sir Henry Wallace, his fortunes change for the better. Sponsored by Henry to study at the Royal Academy of Art, George finds a new world opened up to him – one that includes the eccentric painter, Henry Fuseli.
Fincher has placed his book firmly in the heaving bosom of a Gothic Novel and it’s astonishingly well researched, something the author brings to your attention with his appendix but it’s also very well written with a fluid prose fitting to the time period and has the complexity and twisted morality full of hypocritical choice, brutality and plain unfairness that we imagine gay men would have suffered had they chosen, as many did, to follow their desires during this time. It also allows us to see how those men struggled to make contact, forge relationships even sexual ones and how their ultimate hope for a lover, fair and faithful would pan out within the rigorous constraints of their society.
This has all the usual cross cultural and class mobility that we hope to read in such a book, well hung brawny muscled lads from the fields and rookeries mixed with fine skinned delicate aristocrats, passions heave in secret, moments of sexual bliss explode, gay brothels are raided, blackmail shatters lives but beyond this clichéd and rather depressingly real portrayal of gay life in the early 19th century we have something other, something more, something suggestive of a real narrative too in a very real Jane Austin way, offering different perspectives on relationships and still true today; the book is also honest in its recognition that meaty beauty or just plain old girth is still a passport up through the gay ranks.
Fincher takes us everywhere with his writing and that’s a good thing, every nook and cranny of the plot is explored and this adds real texture to the book and kept my interest in the plot even when I had little sympathy for the characters. It’s always a good sign when the momentum of the plot keeps you turning the pages. Fincher manages to covey a real sense of paranoia, secretive and dangerous, that would have stalked and followed these men who-loved-men throughout their lives and he spares no punches in the vengeance that a spiteful and morally judgemental society takes out on them when they are exposed. Although the main plot is more focussed not on society’s vengeance but that of the main characters and the ultimate price they pay.
It’s an intoxicating read and if you love historical novels then this would be a good investment for your book shelf. It’s been self published and could have done with a little tighter editing to get it slightly more into focus and sharper for the eye, but this is a light criticism of what is a thoroughly able book with a dark and gripping plot. Ficnhers background in English Literature certainly makes this novel a compelling read and allows us to sip the complex flavours of this period and seep in the strong brew of his rich story.
Not the happiest of happy endings, but then not a happy time to be gay, but certainly one of the most candid and honestly representative novels of being gay in the early 19th century that I’ve read in a long time.
Out now in Paper back and E-reader format £12.99
For more info or to buy the book see the author’s website here:
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