Vi skulle älska om vi bara kunde
Hanna Wallsten
221 p

Normal Förlag, 2007

Back cover blurb:

En dag dmpar Ingela flickvännen Susanne för den vackra prästen Katarina.

Susanne drar förtvivlad till Paris för att försonas med sin tvillingsyster som hon inte sett på tio år. Det blir en resa som förändrar flera personers liv - deras öden flätas in i varandra: vi följer Ingela, Anders - Susannes ex - och outsidern Sergej som får en oväntat central roll i allas liv.

När Susanne återvänder hem från Paris har allt förändrats. Ska hon förlåta Ingela? Eller ska hon bejaka den förbjudna känslan, som drar henne till rivalen Katarina…

I must admit that I was very intrigued by the title of this novel, roughly We Would Love If We Only Could, but was unable to decide if it was a grand title or just really pretentious. Unfortunately, it is pretentious. Why? Because the concept of the title is never explored in the novel. What’s the deal with that? I was expecting lesbian anguish, but all I got was boring relations and unimpressive characters laid forth with a drab language.

I wanted it to be a good book, but it wasn’t. It didn’t intrigue me and I wasn’t moved. I felt that I didn’t care if the main character’s father killed himself - why should I care? And he was, after all, the most sympathetic of the characters. Most of the characters lacked any sympathetic character, because all the other characters think about how stupid or shallow or annoying the characters are. It wasn’t a very strategic move. And it made it so very boring.

Maurice
E.M. Forster
263 p.

Penguin Classics, 2005.
(first published 1971 by Edward Arnold - written 1913-14)

For Decades ‘08.

Back cover blurb:

Maurice Hall is a young man who grows up confident in his privileged status and well aware of his role in society. Modest and generally conformist, he nevertheless finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. Through Clive, whom he encounters at Cambridge, and through Alex, the gamekeeper on Clive’s country estate, Maurice gradually experiences a profound emotional and sexual awakening. A tale of passion, bravery and defiance, this intensely personal novel was completed in 1914 but remained unpublished until after Forster’s death in 1970. Compellingly honest and beautifully written, it offers a powerful condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society, and is at oce a moving love story and an intimate tale of one man’s erotic and political self-discovery.

The introduction, by David Leavitt, explores the signifcantce of the novel in relation to Forster’s own life and as a founding work of modern gay literature. This edition reproduces the Abinger text of the novel, and includes new notes, a chronology and further reading.

I read this book for the first time about a year and a half ago. I finished it quickly, perhaps due to the four-hour train-rides. Still, I was instantly intrigued, so intrigued that I bought A Room With A View to get some of Forster’s language. For his language is one of the best things with him. It is subtle and so beautiful. One of my favourite passages goes thusly:

Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered ‘I love you.’ (48)

To be honest, I have some problems with Clive (Durham). This is not because of his character (or yes it is, he’s a bit of an arsehole when he turns straight), but it is because he is played by Hugh Grant in the film-version. So everything he says I hear in Hugh Grant’s voice. I mean, I’m not one of the millions who seem to hate him, but still! It’s a little strange. Strangely, I don’t get the same thing with the rest of the characters. This might be related to the fact that they aren’t well-known characters. Perhaps. Nevermind! Here is another passage I adore!

He shook the ladder and glanced into the woods, but the wish to go into them vanished as soon as he could go. What use was it? He was too old for fun in the damp.

But as he returned to his bed a little noise sounded, a noise so intimate that it might have arisen inside his own body. He seemed to crackle and burn and saw the ladder’s top quivering against the moon-lit air. The head and the shoulders of a man rose up, paused, a gun was leant against the window sill very carefully, and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, ‘Sir, was you calling out for me? … Sir, I know … I know,’ and touched him. (170)

I will not comment on this because I would just splutter incoherently.

Admittedly, I was not quite as taken with the novel this time. This is, however, more to personal reasons than literary. (I felt I recognised Maurice’s and Clive’s relationship a little too well for my liking.) It has, however, made me want to read more Forster again. But I don’t know what to read! Well, seeing as I am pretty much booked full (ohoho, I’m so funny!) until the summer, it’s perhaps good. When time presents itself, I can always ask my literature-nerd-parents what to read.

One thing I love with this novel is that the homosexuals get the happy ending - not the heterosexuals. It is brilliant. I would say “funny”, but that would give you the wrong connotations. Oh, brilliant ol’ Forster!

Now & Then
William Corlett
346 p.

Abacus, 2007.
(First published 1995.)

Back cover blurb:

  Now, Christopher Metcalfe returns to his family home in Kent after the death of his father. Sorting through a box of memorabilia from his days at public school, Chris is suddenly confronted by the face that has haunted him for thirty years.

Then, as a callow fifth former enduring the excesses of a school system designed to run an Empire that no longer existed, a most extraordinary thing happened amid the thrashings and cross-country runs: he was seduced by Stephen Walker, a prefect two years his senior with whom he went on to share a brief but intensely passionate affair. Now, again, alone, approaching the age of fifty, Christopher is painfully aware of the price he paid for letting go, and resolves to find Stephen, and discover what became of the only person he has ever loved.

Before Love was simply ecstatic over it a few weeks ago, I had never heard of this book. (I was under the belief I had never heard of the author, either, but it turns out he wrote the novel the  tv-series The Magician’s House is based on - fancy that!) I naturally assumed that it was a new book, strengthened by the “Winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award”. I also assumed that the book was set roughly nineteen-ten, all due to the hats of the boys in the picture. The fact that people wore them after that time was unthinkable! So, naturally, when I opened it up and saw it was from nineteen-ninetyfive, I was a little surprised! When I started reading and there were all sorts of new things, I smelled a rat. Or, really, I didn’t smell anything; it was so lovely.

I read a rough twenty pages in the morning, before being called away to do something or another. Late at night, when I was going to bed, I decided to sneak in a few pages. Need I say I finished it before turning out the lights? I less than four hours sleep (compared to my usual seven to nine), so it is peculiar I am not seeing things. Apart from the things I should see, of course. One of the things I see is that this is a terrific book. Really top-notch. It is a bit like E.M. Forster’s Maurice and how I imagine Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty would be. (I’ve not yet read the latter, due to lack of time and my father exclaiming something about what bastards they were when he had finished it. Plus my sister nicked it.) It is witty, calm, beautiful, at some places down-right terrifying. A lot of the time, it is really funny. The following bit had me in fits at one o’clock in the morning:

‘Actually, [Roger, the protagonist's nephew] isn’t my type. But I don’t expect you to believe me. I go for the older man. Now, if Richard [Roger's father]  was in my room, you’d have every right to be worried.’ For a moment I could see that she was almost pleased. My words confirmed her unerring taste - even in me. ‘I also, of course, go for the older woman,’ I continued. ‘No, not you, Angela, but Mother. You really wouldn’t be safe from me, darling, so don’t dream of sharing a room with me. You know that incest is all the rage at the moment. I could be your toy-boy son. Would you have me?’
‘Certainly,’ Mother replied gaily. That’s settled, then. Chris will sleep in my bed and Roger can have the room to himself.’
‘What are you both talking about?’ Angela said, looking and sounding bemused.
‘Incest, darling,’ Mother told her.                                         (pp. 190-191)

Of course my laughter was very quiet, not to disturb any sleeping person within a hundred yards around me, but I could’ve awoken the entire neighbourhood - they would surely laugh as well! This quote, too, shows the loveliness of both the main character Chris and his mother. During the first fifty-odd pages his mother annoyed me a little, but then I grew to love her. She might be in her seventies, but she still jokes about incest!

This novel is a reminder for me just how lovely gay lit is, even though I guess it is dreadful to niche it in there. (in an ideal world there shouldn’t be any categories of that kind, should there? But, well! It is such a lovely genre!) Unfortunately, there isn’t all that much I’ve read that is as good as this. I will have to look for a lot more, and I will be glad to. And if it is as good as this, I don’t mind if I sleep four hours a night.

The History Boys
Alan Bennett
109 p + xxvii p

Faber & Faber, 2004.

Back cover blurb:

An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacer. A headmaster obsessed with results; a history teacher who thinks he’s a fool.

In Alan Bennett’s new play, staff-room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

Let’s be honest: I saw the film before I read the play. However, seeing as the differences between the two are so tiny, it doesn’t matter much. I instantly fell in love with the story. I adore Cambridge as a town, and even the slightest mention of it makes me giddy. (My sister got accepted to an undergraduate there, which means I will soon have a reason for going there, apart from homesickness.) Cambridge is mentioned not all the time, but a lot of the time. Oxford is also big, but I’ve never been there, and I don’t have any kind of relationship with that place. Now, the thing is that I don’t want to study in Cambridge. One person in my family’s going there, why should I? It wasn’t Cambridge that was the reason I loved this play so much.

It was the characters and their relationships I completely fell for. They are all so beautiful. Some of them are right arses, but they are described with so much vigour that even the worst people seem interesting. There are extremely few characters - even I, with a memory of about five minutes, can keep track of them. Posner is in love with Dakin, who in turn gets more or less with obsessed with their new teacher, Irwin. This subtle homosexuality, obviously there but never too apparent, was aweinspiring. It is gay at its best. It’s not deemed unnatural, but nor is it that everyone is gay. The cast is almost completely male, with one female teacher, who is fantastic. All of these characters are people I would love to talk to, if only for just a little bit. (I must admit that I wouldn’t want to spend too mcuh time with Dakin, who is a little nasty, despite being extremely fascinating.)

And the language! It is fluid and gentle and honest and it flows like a river. It is sprinkled with references I can and cannot place, incorporated like the most natural thing in the world. They quote poems and songs from the thirties; they know all the words to When I’m Cleaning Windows off by heart. I love George Formby. It’s these small things that makes it is such a joy to read. In the film they play the intro to This Charming Man, which had me in fits of fannish glee. (yes yes yes, I know, you shouldn’t let your opinions of a film influence your opinion of the work it’s based on.)

Now I really want to see the play staged. And I want to see the film again. And then, maybe, I shall read the play again. It was good enough to.