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Alexander's Choice
Sweet-natured, intelligent and good-looking, thirteen-year-old aristocrat Alexander Aylmer seems to have everything going for him when he goes to Eton, the prestigious English public school.
Within months, however, tragedy strikes, leaving him vulnerable, heartbroken and increasingly alone, forced to find his own emotional salvation in a world that is effectively uncaring despite its good intentions. The longings recently come with puberty aggravate his turmoil until he sees the solution to them is the key to everything. Two very different people seem to promise help.
Timid Julian Smith, three years older, nurses two secrets he is terrified the other boys might discover: his humble background as the son of a removals man who had saved all his life to send a son to Eton, and his being hopelessly in love with Alexander.
Damian Cavendish, a charming, young English master, is romantically only interested in women. He is conscious though of a special affinity with boys that has brought him to Eton determined to teach and befriend them. He burns too with a longing to find himself badly needed.
By luck and pluck, Alexander finds his way to unsurpassed happiness. But can he really get away with making his own choices as to how, without regard to what society has decided in advance is good for him?
Alternately uplifting and heart-wrenching, and at times erotic, Alexander’s Choice candidly depicts a kind of passionate love the world is averse to recognising. It also reveals unflinchingly the brutal reality that can face a boy trying to have his emotional needs met in a society fallen into frightened confusion about the sexuality of early teens.
Edmund Marlowe, himself an old boy of the school, has in this, his first novel, accurately evoked the idiosyncratic but appealing world of Eton, which carried on in many of its centuries-old ways, but could not protect its own against the new spirit of the 1980s.
Within months, however, tragedy strikes, leaving him vulnerable, heartbroken and increasingly alone, forced to find his own emotional salvation in a world that is effectively uncaring despite its good intentions. The longings recently come with puberty aggravate his turmoil until he sees the solution to them is the key to everything. Two very different people seem to promise help.
Timid Julian Smith, three years older, nurses two secrets he is terrified the other boys might discover: his humble background as the son of a removals man who had saved all his life to send a son to Eton, and his being hopelessly in love with Alexander.
Damian Cavendish, a charming, young English master, is romantically only interested in women. He is conscious though of a special affinity with boys that has brought him to Eton determined to teach and befriend them. He burns too with a longing to find himself badly needed.
By luck and pluck, Alexander finds his way to unsurpassed happiness. But can he really get away with making his own choices as to how, without regard to what society has decided in advance is good for him?
Alternately uplifting and heart-wrenching, and at times erotic, Alexander’s Choice candidly depicts a kind of passionate love the world is averse to recognising. It also reveals unflinchingly the brutal reality that can face a boy trying to have his emotional needs met in a society fallen into frightened confusion about the sexuality of early teens.
Edmund Marlowe, himself an old boy of the school, has in this, his first novel, accurately evoked the idiosyncratic but appealing world of Eton, which carried on in many of its centuries-old ways, but could not protect its own against the new spirit of the 1980s.
423 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 12, 2012
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165 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
September 5, 2015
This is, without a shadow of a doubt, a beautifully written novel, deeply moving, sometimes erotic, with characters which the author invests with a real psychological depth. The novel follows the course of a sensitive, intelligent and lively Eton schoolboy, thirteen-year-old Alexander Aylmer, as he forms romantic attachments to two others, firstly, Julian, a more senior pupil, and then Damian, a schoolmaster. There is little doubt that the author will be the subject of much opprobrium for this magnificent novel, because of its classical wisdom, because of its rejection of the popular delusions of our age, and because of its sensitive portrayal of a beautiful and beneficial intergenerational relationship. This is only to be expected, and the novel has already aroused the ire of some other reviewers and commentators. But then, as Bertrand Russell once wrote, “It does seem to me...that a useful criterion of the extent to which one has broken new ground, is the hostility incurred from the established, the intellectually smug, and the moral eunuchs of our day.” (Letter to Ernest Gellner, quoted in A. J. Ayer, “More of my Life”, p. 201). To such people, this novel will be a profoundly unsettling experience.
In the end, there are a vast number of people who sincerely believe that contemporary western societies represent the pinnacle of moral enlightenment and tolerance, when a glance at the popular press ought to be sufficient to reveal our epoch as an age of mass manipulation and moral panic without parallel in human history, its claims to superiority in any but the most superficial matters (such as “technology”) utterly risible and indeed contemptible, a theme which is really present throughout Marlowe's novel. And one way in which this deficiency manifests itself is through the failure of society to accord a positive value to pederasty (a failure only possible through an overwhelming historical ignorance given the highly beneficial role which pederasty served in other societies).
It is, indeed, impossible to review this book properly without touching on the subject of intergenerational eroticism, which is at the heart of this novel. Western societies, dominated by the hegemonic child abuse narrative that emerged from feminist circles during the 1970s, regard all such relationships with hysterical condemnation, and effectively deny the power of juvenile sexual desire, and deny juvenile sexual knowledge. The early gay movement, before it allowed itself to be co-opted by the feminists in its rush toward mainstream respectability, knew better, knew that boys, even very young boys, were anything but asexual beings, that sometimes they sought sexual relationships with adults, and that these relationships were characteristically anything but “abusive”. As Harry Hay, the founder and moving force of the Mattachine Society famously said of his first sexual encounter with a man as a fourteen-year-old boy, “I molested an adult until I found out what I needed to know.” It is notable that Hay was in later years a staunch supporter of Nambla (the North American Man-Boy Love Association), and became disillusioned with the gay movement he did so much to launch for its very narrow construction of gay identity. The construction of a gay sexual “identity” inevitably led to the gay movement championing “gay rights” as those of a distinct minority, along the model of the black civil rights movement and in alliance with numerous leftist causes, including feminism. However, it may be that the whole notion of sexual identity which Hay helped to construct was misconceived, precisely because, by conceptualising homosexual behaviour as though it applied only to an identifiable minority, it denied the complexity of erotic and affective response in the great majority of males.
For an even earlier generation, the generation which formed the basis of Alfred Kinsey's pioneering research in the 1940s, homosexuality was not an “identity” at all, but, as Kinsey discovered, a mode of behaviour to which nearly all juvenile and adolescent males were inclined at some time or other and could be seen as an ordinary and indeed desirable part of their growing up, whether such eroticism was expressed with their peers or with an adult male. Over the decades, however, this knowledge was progressively obscured by an increasingly shrill ideology, leading to the current hysteria, in which, in the name of “protecting” children—presumably from their own sexuality—a third of all those currently on the UK's “Sex Offenders' Register” are themselves children and adolescents under the age of eighteen (a fact which you won't be hearing from the tabloid press), the youngest “offenders” being just ten years of age, all this being accomplished without any visible protest from the official gay movement. Far from representing progress, or the advance of civilisation, the movement of western society since the 1960s has been constituted by the progressive abandonment of reason for madness and cruelty.
Above all, then, “Alexander's Choice” is a call for reason and sanity, qualities that have been quietly euthanized in our epoch, but may perhaps one day, in the distant future, flourish again. In a truly civilised world, “Alexander's Choice” would be regarded as a classic work of literature, and be required reading for all secondary school pupils.
In the end, there are a vast number of people who sincerely believe that contemporary western societies represent the pinnacle of moral enlightenment and tolerance, when a glance at the popular press ought to be sufficient to reveal our epoch as an age of mass manipulation and moral panic without parallel in human history, its claims to superiority in any but the most superficial matters (such as “technology”) utterly risible and indeed contemptible, a theme which is really present throughout Marlowe's novel. And one way in which this deficiency manifests itself is through the failure of society to accord a positive value to pederasty (a failure only possible through an overwhelming historical ignorance given the highly beneficial role which pederasty served in other societies).
It is, indeed, impossible to review this book properly without touching on the subject of intergenerational eroticism, which is at the heart of this novel. Western societies, dominated by the hegemonic child abuse narrative that emerged from feminist circles during the 1970s, regard all such relationships with hysterical condemnation, and effectively deny the power of juvenile sexual desire, and deny juvenile sexual knowledge. The early gay movement, before it allowed itself to be co-opted by the feminists in its rush toward mainstream respectability, knew better, knew that boys, even very young boys, were anything but asexual beings, that sometimes they sought sexual relationships with adults, and that these relationships were characteristically anything but “abusive”. As Harry Hay, the founder and moving force of the Mattachine Society famously said of his first sexual encounter with a man as a fourteen-year-old boy, “I molested an adult until I found out what I needed to know.” It is notable that Hay was in later years a staunch supporter of Nambla (the North American Man-Boy Love Association), and became disillusioned with the gay movement he did so much to launch for its very narrow construction of gay identity. The construction of a gay sexual “identity” inevitably led to the gay movement championing “gay rights” as those of a distinct minority, along the model of the black civil rights movement and in alliance with numerous leftist causes, including feminism. However, it may be that the whole notion of sexual identity which Hay helped to construct was misconceived, precisely because, by conceptualising homosexual behaviour as though it applied only to an identifiable minority, it denied the complexity of erotic and affective response in the great majority of males.
For an even earlier generation, the generation which formed the basis of Alfred Kinsey's pioneering research in the 1940s, homosexuality was not an “identity” at all, but, as Kinsey discovered, a mode of behaviour to which nearly all juvenile and adolescent males were inclined at some time or other and could be seen as an ordinary and indeed desirable part of their growing up, whether such eroticism was expressed with their peers or with an adult male. Over the decades, however, this knowledge was progressively obscured by an increasingly shrill ideology, leading to the current hysteria, in which, in the name of “protecting” children—presumably from their own sexuality—a third of all those currently on the UK's “Sex Offenders' Register” are themselves children and adolescents under the age of eighteen (a fact which you won't be hearing from the tabloid press), the youngest “offenders” being just ten years of age, all this being accomplished without any visible protest from the official gay movement. Far from representing progress, or the advance of civilisation, the movement of western society since the 1960s has been constituted by the progressive abandonment of reason for madness and cruelty.
Above all, then, “Alexander's Choice” is a call for reason and sanity, qualities that have been quietly euthanized in our epoch, but may perhaps one day, in the distant future, flourish again. In a truly civilised world, “Alexander's Choice” would be regarded as a classic work of literature, and be required reading for all secondary school pupils.
May 25, 2023
I read parts of this novel a number of years ago because someone I knew had a copy but I couldn't cope with the long winded and tedious prose and returned it intending maybe to read once I got my own copy. As the novel is now such a hit with boy lovers they retail at £75 and only the obsessive could justify paying so much for a bad novel and that is my first and major complaint. This is not a novel it is a justification of men having sex with young adolescent boys. All novels written to justify a point of view, whether on sexual morality, politics or whatever, tend to be poor novels. They may be good polemics, but that is something else.
The point of this novel is to justify the love of an adult, a teacher, for one of his pupils, and let us be clear love means sex. The setting is the 1980's and the school is a boarding school, so we have a society and also a school which actively denounces and condemns homosexual behaviour, even if it no longer actively persecutes by sending them to gaol. Comparisons are made between the persecution of Men who love boys and the persecution of Jews - really I can't even begin to respond to such idiocy. There is extensive talk of societies and times when inter generational sex was more common - though the fails to see that most inter generational sex, even in ancient Greece (of which we hear a great deal of vary unhistoric rubbish), involved girls between 12-14 being married to much older men - rather like what happens in some countries still were virginity is valued above anything else, certainly the wishes or good of the girl, and the honour of a family is seen as bound up with the preservation of that easily lost virginity - so marry them quick and marry them young.
What the author doesn't seem to accept, or understand, that times change and peoples attitudes about what is a child, what is or is not appropriate for a minor, what is the the meaning of minor as a legal status, etc. When the Titanic sank in 1912 the second officer Lightholler tried to stop a 13 year old boy accompanying his mother in the half empty lifeboat that he had also stopped the woman's husband and 21 year old son from entering. When forceful objections were made, the woman was first class as was, obviously the 13 year old boy, Lightholler gave in with a very audible grumble about 'no more boys' and lowered the half empty lifeboat. The husband and older boy drowned as would the 13 year old no doubt. Lightholler knew that was the most probable fate of those he was denying access to, let me remind you of a half empty lifeboat. I don't see that the willingness to allow 13 year old boys to drown in 1912 is any more a guide or example to how we should behave now than other equally ancient examples of when it was thought ok for men to sleep with boys.
Even within the examples that Mr. Marlowe so drearily expostulates on there is a huge difference between a society which at some stage in the past had as part of the ritual of a boy moving into the stare of manhood and what he describes in this novel. Parents don't send boys to boarding school so that their teachers can fall in love with and fuck them. The 'relationship' in this novel is not in any way related to or similar to what went on in ancient Greece.
Novels like this are usually written by men who have very little affinity or sympathy with 'gay liberation'. They usually dislike it because anything that provides a more open and accepting state for young boys struggling to come to terms with their sexuality or merely exploring what they feel allows the boys to turn easily to those of, or close to their own age. They don't need some old man to provide sympathy, support and understanding and while providing it remove their trousers and pants for a quick grope and fumble.
One of the least attractive parts of this and almost every justifying boy love novel and story is to place the active agency on the boy 'they wanted it' which is way to close to the rapists claim that a woman/girl was 'asking for it' for my comfort. Very often it was advice, comfort, or help that was sought, even if they do not find the sexual attentions of an old man (and honestly when you are 13 everyone is old. Even at 18 my own sense of age was completely different then it would be by the time I was 5 or so when I was astonished to discover that so many of the teachers I regarded as ancient were in fact only in their early 30s) that doesn't mean they are a position to understand or be responsible for what they do. Boys once they reach puberty are led by their dicks in the same way they will be for years to come. They do not have the knowledge or experience, they are reliant on others to guide and teach, that is what teachers are for. Whatever defence might be made about such mismatched pairings there is no way I can conceive of justifying that between a teacher and a pupil, no matter what their ages are or their sex. Teachers are 'in loco parentis' and that says all about the grotesqueness of the idea.
But overall it can only arise in situations were homosexuality is taboo and not discussed and is forbidden. No boy is going to go to some old man with his sexual questions or desires if he can have a romp with another boy. Which is why men in western countries who like to have sex with underage boys also tend to be the men who used to frequent areas in the world where poverty meant that the absence of schools, shoes, medical care and opportunity meant that child prostitution flourished. That they so often can be found bemoaning the rise in living standards and government supervision that ensures the boys they fancy are unavailable says everything you need to know about whose needs are being served by the man/boy affairs.
As a final word how can one either romanticise or justify a relationship where one of the parties must be in constant fear of growing, not old, but up. Transience is the essence of boyhood what psychological pressure does that place on the 'beloved' boy to know that every day, every bodily change, every hair, the need to shave, etc. is placing you in a position were the person you 'love' is going to reject you.
Novels like this can exist and be read but don't pretend that they are describing anything except an unequal and selfish relationship
The point of this novel is to justify the love of an adult, a teacher, for one of his pupils, and let us be clear love means sex. The setting is the 1980's and the school is a boarding school, so we have a society and also a school which actively denounces and condemns homosexual behaviour, even if it no longer actively persecutes by sending them to gaol. Comparisons are made between the persecution of Men who love boys and the persecution of Jews - really I can't even begin to respond to such idiocy. There is extensive talk of societies and times when inter generational sex was more common - though the fails to see that most inter generational sex, even in ancient Greece (of which we hear a great deal of vary unhistoric rubbish), involved girls between 12-14 being married to much older men - rather like what happens in some countries still were virginity is valued above anything else, certainly the wishes or good of the girl, and the honour of a family is seen as bound up with the preservation of that easily lost virginity - so marry them quick and marry them young.
What the author doesn't seem to accept, or understand, that times change and peoples attitudes about what is a child, what is or is not appropriate for a minor, what is the the meaning of minor as a legal status, etc. When the Titanic sank in 1912 the second officer Lightholler tried to stop a 13 year old boy accompanying his mother in the half empty lifeboat that he had also stopped the woman's husband and 21 year old son from entering. When forceful objections were made, the woman was first class as was, obviously the 13 year old boy, Lightholler gave in with a very audible grumble about 'no more boys' and lowered the half empty lifeboat. The husband and older boy drowned as would the 13 year old no doubt. Lightholler knew that was the most probable fate of those he was denying access to, let me remind you of a half empty lifeboat. I don't see that the willingness to allow 13 year old boys to drown in 1912 is any more a guide or example to how we should behave now than other equally ancient examples of when it was thought ok for men to sleep with boys.
Even within the examples that Mr. Marlowe so drearily expostulates on there is a huge difference between a society which at some stage in the past had as part of the ritual of a boy moving into the stare of manhood and what he describes in this novel. Parents don't send boys to boarding school so that their teachers can fall in love with and fuck them. The 'relationship' in this novel is not in any way related to or similar to what went on in ancient Greece.
Novels like this are usually written by men who have very little affinity or sympathy with 'gay liberation'. They usually dislike it because anything that provides a more open and accepting state for young boys struggling to come to terms with their sexuality or merely exploring what they feel allows the boys to turn easily to those of, or close to their own age. They don't need some old man to provide sympathy, support and understanding and while providing it remove their trousers and pants for a quick grope and fumble.
One of the least attractive parts of this and almost every justifying boy love novel and story is to place the active agency on the boy 'they wanted it' which is way to close to the rapists claim that a woman/girl was 'asking for it' for my comfort. Very often it was advice, comfort, or help that was sought, even if they do not find the sexual attentions of an old man (and honestly when you are 13 everyone is old. Even at 18 my own sense of age was completely different then it would be by the time I was 5 or so when I was astonished to discover that so many of the teachers I regarded as ancient were in fact only in their early 30s) that doesn't mean they are a position to understand or be responsible for what they do. Boys once they reach puberty are led by their dicks in the same way they will be for years to come. They do not have the knowledge or experience, they are reliant on others to guide and teach, that is what teachers are for. Whatever defence might be made about such mismatched pairings there is no way I can conceive of justifying that between a teacher and a pupil, no matter what their ages are or their sex. Teachers are 'in loco parentis' and that says all about the grotesqueness of the idea.
But overall it can only arise in situations were homosexuality is taboo and not discussed and is forbidden. No boy is going to go to some old man with his sexual questions or desires if he can have a romp with another boy. Which is why men in western countries who like to have sex with underage boys also tend to be the men who used to frequent areas in the world where poverty meant that the absence of schools, shoes, medical care and opportunity meant that child prostitution flourished. That they so often can be found bemoaning the rise in living standards and government supervision that ensures the boys they fancy are unavailable says everything you need to know about whose needs are being served by the man/boy affairs.
As a final word how can one either romanticise or justify a relationship where one of the parties must be in constant fear of growing, not old, but up. Transience is the essence of boyhood what psychological pressure does that place on the 'beloved' boy to know that every day, every bodily change, every hair, the need to shave, etc. is placing you in a position were the person you 'love' is going to reject you.
Novels like this can exist and be read but don't pretend that they are describing anything except an unequal and selfish relationship
March 13, 2021
Having noticed this book recommended on a blog I read regularly, and seen gushing reviews here on amazon, and in the London Review of Books. I ordered it. Though initially put off by the author's overtly nostalgic and precious tone. Superficially enjoyed this novel. In places, I found it quite moving, and highly evocative of life at Eton in the early '80s, it's been hailed as “Eton's Fifty Shades of Gray” and described as so highly accurate by old boys, that it must have been written by an ex-pupil.
But, the arguments in this book for 'love' as the author wants to promote it, began to fall apart for me; as quickly as my poorly bound print-on-demand copy, the spine of which cracked open as I began to read it. This is the first review I have written, but, having reflected on the experience of this book, having so many nagging concerns, I felt I had to share them. Whilst the love story at the heart of this novel is touching, provocative, and challenging, I found myself increasingly becoming suspicious of the dubious motivations and fantasies of the author.
Alexander's Choice deals with the loves of a supposedly 'straight' Eton College student, Alexander, who has a love for classical culture. He experiences an intense romantic friendship with another male student, but after his housemaster intervenes to stop what he perceives as an unhealthy relationship. Alexander then becomes obsessed with the idea of Greek Love, and after the sudden death of his mother, he becomes close to his kindly, English teacher, their close relationship eventually becomes sexual, when the 13-year-old student seduces him on his birthday. There is a gulf between the Platonic ideal of Greek Love, with it's teaching and mentoring aspect, and predatory lust for children, the explicit erotic scenes seemed largely unnecessary to the story, but I suspect perhaps very necessary for the author.
The sexuality and sexual consent of minors and the attitude of people in positions of care is are difficult issues that the novel tries to address, but, having known a couple of people who have been victims of abuse, this left a lingering bad taste for me, the real issues of sexual abuse are glossed over in the novel. And it's a notable and critical failing, especially after the recent public inquiries into decades of horrendous sexual abuse in the church and other places of care, much of the public hysteria is justified, given the vast networks recently uncovered and dismantled by international policing.
This love story is an exception, that tries desperately to twist itself into a rule, and I felt it was trying to use a touching, tragic love story to try to convince me that sex between a disturbed 13-year-old (Alexander's mother had recently suddenly died) and an adult is ok.
Towards the end, the novel tries speak-up for tolerance and moderation, and to draw parallels between the hysteria over paedophilia and the persecution of Jews and other minorities during WWII, specifically homosexuals, drawn from the experiences of the German-born father of Alexander's spurned friend, a concentration camp survivor. As the characters in this book don't identify as gay, and to all intents and purposes this is really a book about contemporary paedophilia, the holocaust is not a relevant comparison, and offensive.
I also thought the melodramatic multiple tragedies of the ending were over the top. And I found the female characters two dimensional, the only real female character was a ridiculous parody of power-hungry 80's feminism. Additionally, the typography, specifically the wedding style fonts used in an attempt to try to mimic handwriting, were a poor design choice and very hard to read - why not just italicise?
I have so many gnawing reservations about this book it's hard to list them all, Yes - it's a thought-provoking exploration of age, institutions, consent, love and sexuality. But, I can't help but feel that under a veil of innocence and teenage sexual awakening, its an erotic novel with a sinister agenda. One that is desperate to be an apology, albeit a promotion, and a defence of paedophilia, as I read it, I felt a growing suspicion that I was being relentlessly charmed and groomed into agreeing with the author's beliefs, and middle-aged fantasies, driven by his dangerously delusional and predatory man-boy love agenda. Who is Edmund Marlowe? Very little information is provided about him, perhaps with good reason. But I am certain that the author is no Oscar Wilde or Nabokov, this is no Lolita.
I can honestly say that on reflection, I feel ashamed to have enjoyed reading this book, and I hope that this review will be useful to other readers who are considering ordering it. There are a number of excited, but uncritical reviews on the internet (on sites like boychat.org, and other message boards promoting man-boy love, where the author appears to be an active member) they clearly miss the dangerous flaws in the book, or are complicit in them, which is disappointing, but not perhaps surprising.
Dangerous books of this nature used to be banned, but this is no longer the case, so I hope that on its dishonest agenda, it is ignored. I binned mine.
But, the arguments in this book for 'love' as the author wants to promote it, began to fall apart for me; as quickly as my poorly bound print-on-demand copy, the spine of which cracked open as I began to read it. This is the first review I have written, but, having reflected on the experience of this book, having so many nagging concerns, I felt I had to share them. Whilst the love story at the heart of this novel is touching, provocative, and challenging, I found myself increasingly becoming suspicious of the dubious motivations and fantasies of the author.
Alexander's Choice deals with the loves of a supposedly 'straight' Eton College student, Alexander, who has a love for classical culture. He experiences an intense romantic friendship with another male student, but after his housemaster intervenes to stop what he perceives as an unhealthy relationship. Alexander then becomes obsessed with the idea of Greek Love, and after the sudden death of his mother, he becomes close to his kindly, English teacher, their close relationship eventually becomes sexual, when the 13-year-old student seduces him on his birthday. There is a gulf between the Platonic ideal of Greek Love, with it's teaching and mentoring aspect, and predatory lust for children, the explicit erotic scenes seemed largely unnecessary to the story, but I suspect perhaps very necessary for the author.
The sexuality and sexual consent of minors and the attitude of people in positions of care is are difficult issues that the novel tries to address, but, having known a couple of people who have been victims of abuse, this left a lingering bad taste for me, the real issues of sexual abuse are glossed over in the novel. And it's a notable and critical failing, especially after the recent public inquiries into decades of horrendous sexual abuse in the church and other places of care, much of the public hysteria is justified, given the vast networks recently uncovered and dismantled by international policing.
This love story is an exception, that tries desperately to twist itself into a rule, and I felt it was trying to use a touching, tragic love story to try to convince me that sex between a disturbed 13-year-old (Alexander's mother had recently suddenly died) and an adult is ok.
Towards the end, the novel tries speak-up for tolerance and moderation, and to draw parallels between the hysteria over paedophilia and the persecution of Jews and other minorities during WWII, specifically homosexuals, drawn from the experiences of the German-born father of Alexander's spurned friend, a concentration camp survivor. As the characters in this book don't identify as gay, and to all intents and purposes this is really a book about contemporary paedophilia, the holocaust is not a relevant comparison, and offensive.
I also thought the melodramatic multiple tragedies of the ending were over the top. And I found the female characters two dimensional, the only real female character was a ridiculous parody of power-hungry 80's feminism. Additionally, the typography, specifically the wedding style fonts used in an attempt to try to mimic handwriting, were a poor design choice and very hard to read - why not just italicise?
I have so many gnawing reservations about this book it's hard to list them all, Yes - it's a thought-provoking exploration of age, institutions, consent, love and sexuality. But, I can't help but feel that under a veil of innocence and teenage sexual awakening, its an erotic novel with a sinister agenda. One that is desperate to be an apology, albeit a promotion, and a defence of paedophilia, as I read it, I felt a growing suspicion that I was being relentlessly charmed and groomed into agreeing with the author's beliefs, and middle-aged fantasies, driven by his dangerously delusional and predatory man-boy love agenda. Who is Edmund Marlowe? Very little information is provided about him, perhaps with good reason. But I am certain that the author is no Oscar Wilde or Nabokov, this is no Lolita.
I can honestly say that on reflection, I feel ashamed to have enjoyed reading this book, and I hope that this review will be useful to other readers who are considering ordering it. There are a number of excited, but uncritical reviews on the internet (on sites like boychat.org, and other message boards promoting man-boy love, where the author appears to be an active member) they clearly miss the dangerous flaws in the book, or are complicit in them, which is disappointing, but not perhaps surprising.
Dangerous books of this nature used to be banned, but this is no longer the case, so I hope that on its dishonest agenda, it is ignored. I binned mine.
January 8, 2019
The story of Alexander's Choice is in its essentials easily summarised. A teacher and pupil at Eton enjoy a sexual relationship. They are betrayed and their lives destroyed. The simplicity of the story line contrasts with the complexity of the issues which it raises.
The tale switches uneasily between propaganda and romance. At one level, it is the story of a boyhood romance at Eton College, in the tradition of "Sandel", "Lord Dismiss Us", or in French literature Montherlant's "Les Garcons" and Roger Peryfitte's "Les Amitiés particulières". At another level it is a plea for tolerance in the wave of the West's discovery of a new total evil to hunt down, encompassed by the word "paedophilia". The hero of the novel, Alexander, is every sense a noble and attractive child. Exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally beautiful, he is perhaps "too good to be true". The love story is of a happy relationship in the style of Angus Stewart's Sandel but fast forwarded to a much less tolerant time, the Britain of the 1980's instead of the Britain of the late 1950's. The at first surprising implication that Britain is now less tolerant than it was is an argument of the writer’s with which I wholeheartedly concur. Having grown up in the 1970's I can state with confidence that British society has become less tolerant, more oppressive and which is perhaps an inevitable result, considerably less intelligent. Politicians tremble before a mob which is repeatedly “outraged” disgusted” and of course, how can we ever forget, “deeply offended.” In this repsect at least, Muslim immigrants must feel themselves “home from home” in a country where at any moment the police might be knocking on your door telling you that something you have said or done has caused “gross offence” to someone else.
The ideal love story makes of the main protagonists characters whose naivety and goodness, (the boy entirely and the teacher largely seem blithely indifferent ignorant of the risks they are running) make them hard to believe. Love's young dream has not had time to in any way fade, wilt, or show signs of strain before it is violently interrupted. At this point we can see where love story and propaganda interlink effortlessly, "Alexander's Choice" being firstly the tale of the destruction of young love by forces which can from the writer's point of view can only be seen as evil. The propaganda element is that the relationship is idealised. The Eton teacher who has a relationship with a boy at the school, is not a mixed blessing, he is an absolute blessing. The lovers are betrayed by a boy at the school who is driven by jealousy and who has little inkling of the extent of the misery he will cause.
Because this is a propaganda book, the forces of evil, in this case one boy's America-loving puritanical feminist campaigning mother is a caricature (although, alas, many such people in real life do come dangerously close to the stereotype). The love scenes are written in a purple and ocasionallyl archaic prose, a sort of hyperbole of a third sex Uranian ideal. Many readers may find the book too long. The characters take pages and pages to reach agonizing decisions. There are long references to the highly idealised love of the Ancient Greeks which are reproduced from Robert Flaciliere's "Love in Ancient Greece", all inspired with the spirit of Mary Renault, whom the author obviously much admires. On the other hand, the mediocre characters in the book are convincingly portrayed, the selfish ambitious house master, the second-rate snitch who does not realise what damage he causes. This last character plays a major role in sex scandal cases of this kind. Prosecutions are often hard to pursue because authorities are often hard put to find witnesses. Where witnesses do come forward, it is not unusual that they were the ones not abused, or who were replaced by someone else as teacher's “blue eyed boy”. Envy and jealousy play a big role in many denunciations in "paedophile" cases.
Distinctions have to be made, clearly, and just as society demonises, this propaganda idealises. The truth is often a messy compromise. For my own part I believe in the right of society to maintain an appearance of stability and order even if there are outsiders who breach that order and its rules, who are tolerated so long as they do not flaunt themselves, become blatant, openly disdainful of social mores. It is a fine line to tread but there is no doubt in my mind that Western society so far as the subject of this novel is conerned, has lost a sesne of proportion.
One very telling point is made by the author at the end of the book:
"..every generation was hypocritically ready to denounce the cruelty of its predecessors while remaining blind to its own. Had not the same Romans that invaded Britain partly in order to wipe out the cruel and uncivilised human sacrifices of the druids soon afterwards unashamedly fed to the lions the early Christians whom they believed to be evil? And had not the same Mediaeval monks who denounced the cruelty of the Roman emperors and were eager to do good themselves tortured heretics to save their souls? And had not those heretics who damned the Inquisition for unparalleled cruelty gone on to burn and torture witches for the common good?" We can take the proposition one step further. Many "gay rights" campaigners and still more feminists are in the forefront of calls to hunt with more diligence and punish with more severe sentences the "evil predators". (page 416).
There is a parallel drawn to the persecution of Jews in National Socialist Germany and the comparison is apt, albeit some people might find it distasteful (but if they do so, that will go to show how true the above quotation is: those who are persecuted under one system of values look to find victims under another set of values) . Jews were seen as the summation of all evil just as "paedophiles" are today. There is obviously a need deep in the human psyche to have an identifiable enemy whom it is desirable to hunt, expose, break and burn. Journalists who in the fifties assured their readers that "homosexuals" were sick, today say that "homophobes" are sick and it would not surprise me at all if sometimes the same journalists were writing almost identical articles just replacing one word with another. Clearly human kind cannot endure very much intelligence and needs to be assured by "experts" and scientists, who fulfil the role today once the reserve of priests, of pronouncing on what is right and what is wrong. They believe of course that they are acting on “instincts”, but to a significant extent “instincts" can be induced and stimulated by anyone in a position of power to do so. Once it was common for homosexuals to feel inadequate and depressed. Now they seem to be empowered and successful. Instinct? Natural tendency? The moral hegemony wields enormous power.
This story, like many a propaganda work of protest, is overcast with gloom and pessimism. The end makes for unenjoyable reading; the writer offers no hope. Love is destroyed and so are creative lives. I am reminded of "Darkness at Noon". Koestler's book is a bitter admission that communism was not the beginning of a more truthful or just time and in the same way "Alexander's Choice" tells us that the permissive society, still less feminism and women's rights, have not brought about a generally more tolerant or gentle society after all. Britain is a much less tolerant society in the early twenty-first century than it was fifty years ago. Who would have thought fifty years ago that in this century it would be illegal to smoke in a public house? The obsession with human safety which has from time immemorial underlined oppression ("we are doing this for your own good") has erupted in the West into frankly pseudo-benevolent "health and safety issues" which are often no more than pretexts to extend oppressive paternalism, if not outright tyranny. The role of money is never far away in social change. The millions of near manadatory hideous plastic helmets for bicycle riders are making some folk a fair pile of lolly.
I have no doubt that bogus "concerns for safety" have been used to impose the authority of the state on school and church and to extend the power of the state.
But there is another side to this which the author deftly ignores, namely that where the hand of the state or a higher moral authority is not exercised, many forms of abuse and cruelty will flourish. Anarchy is accompanied by its own cruelties, being notably the rule of the strong. At the heart of the argument is the belief that children need to be protected. The writer completely ignores this argument. He gives it no hearing whatsoever. Does he believe that it is all right to give children alcohol and drugs if they consent to that? And how does one define consent in these cases? And should there be no age of consent whatsoever?
And what about a society which has few rules? Eton and Harrow before the religious revival were extremely cruel places as readers of "Tom Brown's School Days" will be aware. The repression of Public Schools was at its height before the sexual revolution and retreated before the advance of feminism and liberalism and lately most fatally co-education. In earlier days in Eton boys were flogged by prefects while adults were nowhere to be seen; and it was the same moral impetus or the same kind of moral outrage which by ecerting pressure, put a halt to that.Needless to say, but I shall say it anyway, not all relationships are anything like as romantic idealistic and selfless as the one portrayed with such passion in "Alexander's Choice", which eloquently pleads the case that far from being deleterious, the relationship between young man and adolescent, is mutually and even socially beneficial.
At one point in the story the headmaster is offended by the police referring to the case of paedophilia. He likes to be precise and his mind he classifies this as a case of paederasty, a fine definition likely to be lost on the boys in blue and on the general public. The irony would be outlandish if the writer is implying that a hunt for paedophiles would be acceptable so long as the prey did not include paederasts! It does raise the question of the age of consent. If the great weakness of the liberal case is an examination of the implications and limits of consent and barriers, the great weakness in the arguments of those who approve of blanket tough laws in cases like this is that they wilfully deny that minors have sexual feelings or can take sexual initiatives. All blame is placed on the adult. This is obvious humbug, yet it is a key argument that the minor is always truthful and always victim. The matter of children's sexuality is entirely ignored when considering cases. It is about as believable as the long maintained myth that animals were unable to feel pain or sorrow which justified any mistreatment or cruelty. It was patently wrong but maintained as a useful fiction in order to deflect on ethical issues arising from mistreatment of animals. Much the same takes place so far as child sexuality is concerned. To admit its existence would open the floodgates of debate. And genuine objective debate makes most missionaries extremely uncomfortable.
With the advance of investigative journalism and everyone's access to news from nowhere and everywhere, and as appropriate to what mystics call our "Age of Aquarius", little can be concealed. Politicians are held to account for actions committed a quarter of a century ago. The arrogance of Joe Public increases daily and the heady admixture of sadism and rampant envy towards anyone happy and successful, the lynch mob howls with glea when anyone, but especially a celebrity, trips up over one of the wires of what is fashionably deemed to “cause gross offence”, what is "exploitive" or "inappropriate". As the list keeps getting longer (it is now grossly offensive to woolf-whistle at a woman) those not wishing to transgress are compelled to update the current list of offences. A reshowing of "East Enders" from the 1980's reminds modern viewers that the soap was first broadcast in the 1980's and some scenes might now be, yup.."offensive".
The compromises of the past, comprises and not resolutions though they were, were far preferable to all this. The Percival Prouts, the Grimes of the world, were tolerated so long as they did not become blatant. Far flung outposts of the British Empire was available for the banishing of the incorrigible while a number of unfortunate homosexuals were sacrificed on the altar of public opinion to appease the thirst for punishment which the public craved. The idol had to be fed. But so far as exuality is concerned, his esurience has become insatiable.
It is not without irony that after the likes of the teacher described in this book, it is of all people national socialists who are subjected to the same hysterical hatred and persecution as once were their Jewish victims. The language and denuciation used by the anti-fascist is little different to the language of the brownshirts in the last century, with fascists replacing Jews as the prey to be sought out and smashed. The recurring cycle of choosing a sacrificial victim continues.
This is not say that there are not dangerous predators and not for that matter dangerous anti-semites, but to reach the point of challenging the right to express an opinion amounting to a defence of “offensive” views is to challenge the very principle of free speech itself. If even pronouncing say anti-semitic views or calling for more tolerance for relationships between adults and minors is practically in itself an offence, and we are not far from that, then free speech is in danger, yes even in a country which prides itself on being a bastion of free speech. "Causing offence" is the pretext which is willingly used increasingly to confine every more narrow limits to free speech. An ominous aspect of the English language in this respect is that it has the same word, “offence” to denote an affront to feelings and a breaking of the law.
To keep out of trouble in any country, one should follow the country/social norms in politics, religion and sexuality, and the most dangerous transgressions of all are sexual ones; sex, poltiics and religion are the three aspects of human culture and endeavour which have caused the great majority of persecutions, lunacies and wars and oppressions in the history of mankind.
If this book manages to make some people sit up and think about the complexity of what moral campaigners and the "outraged" present as a cut and dry issue, it will have achieved a very worthy aim. But there is not getting round the fact that human beings will always be on the lookout for heretics to burn. It must be in our genes.
The tale switches uneasily between propaganda and romance. At one level, it is the story of a boyhood romance at Eton College, in the tradition of "Sandel", "Lord Dismiss Us", or in French literature Montherlant's "Les Garcons" and Roger Peryfitte's "Les Amitiés particulières". At another level it is a plea for tolerance in the wave of the West's discovery of a new total evil to hunt down, encompassed by the word "paedophilia". The hero of the novel, Alexander, is every sense a noble and attractive child. Exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally beautiful, he is perhaps "too good to be true". The love story is of a happy relationship in the style of Angus Stewart's Sandel but fast forwarded to a much less tolerant time, the Britain of the 1980's instead of the Britain of the late 1950's. The at first surprising implication that Britain is now less tolerant than it was is an argument of the writer’s with which I wholeheartedly concur. Having grown up in the 1970's I can state with confidence that British society has become less tolerant, more oppressive and which is perhaps an inevitable result, considerably less intelligent. Politicians tremble before a mob which is repeatedly “outraged” disgusted” and of course, how can we ever forget, “deeply offended.” In this repsect at least, Muslim immigrants must feel themselves “home from home” in a country where at any moment the police might be knocking on your door telling you that something you have said or done has caused “gross offence” to someone else.
The ideal love story makes of the main protagonists characters whose naivety and goodness, (the boy entirely and the teacher largely seem blithely indifferent ignorant of the risks they are running) make them hard to believe. Love's young dream has not had time to in any way fade, wilt, or show signs of strain before it is violently interrupted. At this point we can see where love story and propaganda interlink effortlessly, "Alexander's Choice" being firstly the tale of the destruction of young love by forces which can from the writer's point of view can only be seen as evil. The propaganda element is that the relationship is idealised. The Eton teacher who has a relationship with a boy at the school, is not a mixed blessing, he is an absolute blessing. The lovers are betrayed by a boy at the school who is driven by jealousy and who has little inkling of the extent of the misery he will cause.
Because this is a propaganda book, the forces of evil, in this case one boy's America-loving puritanical feminist campaigning mother is a caricature (although, alas, many such people in real life do come dangerously close to the stereotype). The love scenes are written in a purple and ocasionallyl archaic prose, a sort of hyperbole of a third sex Uranian ideal. Many readers may find the book too long. The characters take pages and pages to reach agonizing decisions. There are long references to the highly idealised love of the Ancient Greeks which are reproduced from Robert Flaciliere's "Love in Ancient Greece", all inspired with the spirit of Mary Renault, whom the author obviously much admires. On the other hand, the mediocre characters in the book are convincingly portrayed, the selfish ambitious house master, the second-rate snitch who does not realise what damage he causes. This last character plays a major role in sex scandal cases of this kind. Prosecutions are often hard to pursue because authorities are often hard put to find witnesses. Where witnesses do come forward, it is not unusual that they were the ones not abused, or who were replaced by someone else as teacher's “blue eyed boy”. Envy and jealousy play a big role in many denunciations in "paedophile" cases.
Distinctions have to be made, clearly, and just as society demonises, this propaganda idealises. The truth is often a messy compromise. For my own part I believe in the right of society to maintain an appearance of stability and order even if there are outsiders who breach that order and its rules, who are tolerated so long as they do not flaunt themselves, become blatant, openly disdainful of social mores. It is a fine line to tread but there is no doubt in my mind that Western society so far as the subject of this novel is conerned, has lost a sesne of proportion.
One very telling point is made by the author at the end of the book:
"..every generation was hypocritically ready to denounce the cruelty of its predecessors while remaining blind to its own. Had not the same Romans that invaded Britain partly in order to wipe out the cruel and uncivilised human sacrifices of the druids soon afterwards unashamedly fed to the lions the early Christians whom they believed to be evil? And had not the same Mediaeval monks who denounced the cruelty of the Roman emperors and were eager to do good themselves tortured heretics to save their souls? And had not those heretics who damned the Inquisition for unparalleled cruelty gone on to burn and torture witches for the common good?" We can take the proposition one step further. Many "gay rights" campaigners and still more feminists are in the forefront of calls to hunt with more diligence and punish with more severe sentences the "evil predators". (page 416).
There is a parallel drawn to the persecution of Jews in National Socialist Germany and the comparison is apt, albeit some people might find it distasteful (but if they do so, that will go to show how true the above quotation is: those who are persecuted under one system of values look to find victims under another set of values) . Jews were seen as the summation of all evil just as "paedophiles" are today. There is obviously a need deep in the human psyche to have an identifiable enemy whom it is desirable to hunt, expose, break and burn. Journalists who in the fifties assured their readers that "homosexuals" were sick, today say that "homophobes" are sick and it would not surprise me at all if sometimes the same journalists were writing almost identical articles just replacing one word with another. Clearly human kind cannot endure very much intelligence and needs to be assured by "experts" and scientists, who fulfil the role today once the reserve of priests, of pronouncing on what is right and what is wrong. They believe of course that they are acting on “instincts”, but to a significant extent “instincts" can be induced and stimulated by anyone in a position of power to do so. Once it was common for homosexuals to feel inadequate and depressed. Now they seem to be empowered and successful. Instinct? Natural tendency? The moral hegemony wields enormous power.
This story, like many a propaganda work of protest, is overcast with gloom and pessimism. The end makes for unenjoyable reading; the writer offers no hope. Love is destroyed and so are creative lives. I am reminded of "Darkness at Noon". Koestler's book is a bitter admission that communism was not the beginning of a more truthful or just time and in the same way "Alexander's Choice" tells us that the permissive society, still less feminism and women's rights, have not brought about a generally more tolerant or gentle society after all. Britain is a much less tolerant society in the early twenty-first century than it was fifty years ago. Who would have thought fifty years ago that in this century it would be illegal to smoke in a public house? The obsession with human safety which has from time immemorial underlined oppression ("we are doing this for your own good") has erupted in the West into frankly pseudo-benevolent "health and safety issues" which are often no more than pretexts to extend oppressive paternalism, if not outright tyranny. The role of money is never far away in social change. The millions of near manadatory hideous plastic helmets for bicycle riders are making some folk a fair pile of lolly.
I have no doubt that bogus "concerns for safety" have been used to impose the authority of the state on school and church and to extend the power of the state.
But there is another side to this which the author deftly ignores, namely that where the hand of the state or a higher moral authority is not exercised, many forms of abuse and cruelty will flourish. Anarchy is accompanied by its own cruelties, being notably the rule of the strong. At the heart of the argument is the belief that children need to be protected. The writer completely ignores this argument. He gives it no hearing whatsoever. Does he believe that it is all right to give children alcohol and drugs if they consent to that? And how does one define consent in these cases? And should there be no age of consent whatsoever?
And what about a society which has few rules? Eton and Harrow before the religious revival were extremely cruel places as readers of "Tom Brown's School Days" will be aware. The repression of Public Schools was at its height before the sexual revolution and retreated before the advance of feminism and liberalism and lately most fatally co-education. In earlier days in Eton boys were flogged by prefects while adults were nowhere to be seen; and it was the same moral impetus or the same kind of moral outrage which by ecerting pressure, put a halt to that.Needless to say, but I shall say it anyway, not all relationships are anything like as romantic idealistic and selfless as the one portrayed with such passion in "Alexander's Choice", which eloquently pleads the case that far from being deleterious, the relationship between young man and adolescent, is mutually and even socially beneficial.
At one point in the story the headmaster is offended by the police referring to the case of paedophilia. He likes to be precise and his mind he classifies this as a case of paederasty, a fine definition likely to be lost on the boys in blue and on the general public. The irony would be outlandish if the writer is implying that a hunt for paedophiles would be acceptable so long as the prey did not include paederasts! It does raise the question of the age of consent. If the great weakness of the liberal case is an examination of the implications and limits of consent and barriers, the great weakness in the arguments of those who approve of blanket tough laws in cases like this is that they wilfully deny that minors have sexual feelings or can take sexual initiatives. All blame is placed on the adult. This is obvious humbug, yet it is a key argument that the minor is always truthful and always victim. The matter of children's sexuality is entirely ignored when considering cases. It is about as believable as the long maintained myth that animals were unable to feel pain or sorrow which justified any mistreatment or cruelty. It was patently wrong but maintained as a useful fiction in order to deflect on ethical issues arising from mistreatment of animals. Much the same takes place so far as child sexuality is concerned. To admit its existence would open the floodgates of debate. And genuine objective debate makes most missionaries extremely uncomfortable.
With the advance of investigative journalism and everyone's access to news from nowhere and everywhere, and as appropriate to what mystics call our "Age of Aquarius", little can be concealed. Politicians are held to account for actions committed a quarter of a century ago. The arrogance of Joe Public increases daily and the heady admixture of sadism and rampant envy towards anyone happy and successful, the lynch mob howls with glea when anyone, but especially a celebrity, trips up over one of the wires of what is fashionably deemed to “cause gross offence”, what is "exploitive" or "inappropriate". As the list keeps getting longer (it is now grossly offensive to woolf-whistle at a woman) those not wishing to transgress are compelled to update the current list of offences. A reshowing of "East Enders" from the 1980's reminds modern viewers that the soap was first broadcast in the 1980's and some scenes might now be, yup.."offensive".
The compromises of the past, comprises and not resolutions though they were, were far preferable to all this. The Percival Prouts, the Grimes of the world, were tolerated so long as they did not become blatant. Far flung outposts of the British Empire was available for the banishing of the incorrigible while a number of unfortunate homosexuals were sacrificed on the altar of public opinion to appease the thirst for punishment which the public craved. The idol had to be fed. But so far as exuality is concerned, his esurience has become insatiable.
It is not without irony that after the likes of the teacher described in this book, it is of all people national socialists who are subjected to the same hysterical hatred and persecution as once were their Jewish victims. The language and denuciation used by the anti-fascist is little different to the language of the brownshirts in the last century, with fascists replacing Jews as the prey to be sought out and smashed. The recurring cycle of choosing a sacrificial victim continues.
This is not say that there are not dangerous predators and not for that matter dangerous anti-semites, but to reach the point of challenging the right to express an opinion amounting to a defence of “offensive” views is to challenge the very principle of free speech itself. If even pronouncing say anti-semitic views or calling for more tolerance for relationships between adults and minors is practically in itself an offence, and we are not far from that, then free speech is in danger, yes even in a country which prides itself on being a bastion of free speech. "Causing offence" is the pretext which is willingly used increasingly to confine every more narrow limits to free speech. An ominous aspect of the English language in this respect is that it has the same word, “offence” to denote an affront to feelings and a breaking of the law.
To keep out of trouble in any country, one should follow the country/social norms in politics, religion and sexuality, and the most dangerous transgressions of all are sexual ones; sex, poltiics and religion are the three aspects of human culture and endeavour which have caused the great majority of persecutions, lunacies and wars and oppressions in the history of mankind.
If this book manages to make some people sit up and think about the complexity of what moral campaigners and the "outraged" present as a cut and dry issue, it will have achieved a very worthy aim. But there is not getting round the fact that human beings will always be on the lookout for heretics to burn. It must be in our genes.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 27, 2016
The book was clearly written with energy and dedication and I would be interested in understanding the author's inspiration.
It is a subject requiring a delicate touch and the author was sensitive to this.
I have two minor grumbles: pace and euphemism.
The unevenness of pace was problematical for the reader: poetical indulgences slowed the first half and the dramatic sequences at the end were too rushed to be appreciated.
The scenes with the lovers were spoiled by the use of archaic euphemisms. I particularly recoiled at the phrases "beloved's nectar" and "liquid love". One comment described it as erotic in places. If you are turned on by, "His body spoke for him with the part of the male that cannot lie" then so be it but unfortunately it made me laugh. Sex scenes are difficult to write without awkwardness but there are several good examples of this type on the web.
My main difficulty lay with the portrayal of women - all nasty harridans except two mummy-types - and with the last chapter which confused me terribly. The book had, to this point, asked the reader to view the lovers differently by drawing on historical perspectives and not to make a sweeping judgement. In contrast, the last chapter was filled with sweeping judgemental statements; a character describes his wife as "a mere instrument of a pervasive human evil". Maybe it was just me but it seemed at cross purposes and confused the message.
The book ends with a whistle stop tour through history to prove that all ages are cruel although the Greeks seem to be exempt - perhaps because they understood Greek love.
This is a book that requires reflection and discussion, and I look forward to book club discussion.
It is a subject requiring a delicate touch and the author was sensitive to this.
I have two minor grumbles: pace and euphemism.
The unevenness of pace was problematical for the reader: poetical indulgences slowed the first half and the dramatic sequences at the end were too rushed to be appreciated.
The scenes with the lovers were spoiled by the use of archaic euphemisms. I particularly recoiled at the phrases "beloved's nectar" and "liquid love". One comment described it as erotic in places. If you are turned on by, "His body spoke for him with the part of the male that cannot lie" then so be it but unfortunately it made me laugh. Sex scenes are difficult to write without awkwardness but there are several good examples of this type on the web.
My main difficulty lay with the portrayal of women - all nasty harridans except two mummy-types - and with the last chapter which confused me terribly. The book had, to this point, asked the reader to view the lovers differently by drawing on historical perspectives and not to make a sweeping judgement. In contrast, the last chapter was filled with sweeping judgemental statements; a character describes his wife as "a mere instrument of a pervasive human evil". Maybe it was just me but it seemed at cross purposes and confused the message.
The book ends with a whistle stop tour through history to prove that all ages are cruel although the Greeks seem to be exempt - perhaps because they understood Greek love.
This is a book that requires reflection and discussion, and I look forward to book club discussion.
November 29, 2013
Well done 'Edmund Marlowe.' This book portrays an older-younger sexual relationship in an honest, realistic way. Sadly, also realistic is the blindly destructive reaction of the authorities leading to the death of the two lovers. We need more books like this to help counter the current insane 'pedophile panic' running through the media and wider society. Its a good read but I warn anyone with a closed mind that if they're expecting smug conventional moralising they're going to be disappointed and disturbed - and good thing too.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 6, 2018
When reading this book, I was already thinking that I would write a review of it and about what I would write. There are two aspects to this book that I thought should be reviewed separately, but the extremely powerful closing chapters have made this division less clear in my mind.
Firstly it is a work of fiction, the story of a great love and a heartbreaking and enraging tragedy. Alexander Aylmer is a extremely beautiful, intelligent and sensitive 13 then 14 year old boy student at Eton college at Windsor in England. He is from an aristocratic family and the son of a judge. He has a loving mother but a somewhat aloof father. Alexander’s mother dies suddenly while he is at Eton. Though heterosexual, Alexander has a relationship with a 17 year old fellow student, Julian Smith, the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has idealised the English and has worked extremely hard and made many sacrifices to get his son into Eton and take his place in English upper class society. Though Julian’s relationship with Alexander never becomes physical, it causes a scandal and Julian’s father forces him to end it.
Alexander’s despair at the sudden breakdown of his relationship with Julian is noticed by his English teacher Damien Cavendish. Damien is a 23 year old enthusiastic and caring English master newly arrived at Eton. He previously unjustly accused Alexander of lying about a late essay that has been shat on by a dog. Damien invited Alexander back to his flat for a talk during which Alexander breaks down and tells him all about what he has been going through since the death of his mother and his breakup with Julian. Damien allows Alexander to cry in his arms, the first physical affection Alexander has felt since the loss of his mother.
Damien allows Alexander to visit him in his flat whenever he wants to. The author makes it clear that both Alexander and Damien are heterosexual. In fact it is a slightly sour note in this book that in order to make that distinction, its portrayal of gay men is negative. Indeed it is made clearer as the story progresses that the mediocre and cowardly Julian is gay. Nevertheless, Alexander and Damien soon find themselves deeply in love with each other. The depth of their relationship completely relieves Alexander’s depression, increases his confidence and results in a spectacular improvement in his academic performance. Ultimately, fully at Alexander’s instigation, their relationship becomes sexual.
Secondly, this book aims to make a political point. Specifically, that there is nothing wrong with “pederasty”, that is, sexual relationships between men and “boys” meaning young post pubescent sexually aware teenagers, as opposed to “pedophilia”, sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. It argues the virtues of these relationships and that there is no place for interference by the law. More generally, the book argues that throughout history, people have sought to identify evil where often no evil exists purely in order to have something to stand shoulder to shoulder against, often in the process perpetrating far more evil than what they purport to be fighting.
In this argument, the book frequently references “Greek Love”, the custom in Ancient Greece that young men not marry until they are in their mid to late twenties, and before then seek out the customary role of mentor to a boy. It was also the role of a teenage boy to find such a mentor and the process was one of romance and courtship. The relationship was primarily educational but also involved love and sex. It is argued in this book and also elsewhere that this custom is the main reason that the cluster of small villages (in terms of population) that was Ancient Greece brought us so many great minds, poets, playwrights and artists that remain influential today.
Certainly the modern relationship between Alexander and Damian portrayed in the book fits very well into this ancient ideal and must be considered blameless and clearly of benefit to Alexander. Those who see evil and seek to “rescue” Alexander from “sexual abuse” ultimately become responsible for great tragedy and immeasurable evil.
Of course, one can not generalise too far from this. We hear many cases of sexual abuse of young teenagers and children at the hands of the staff of institutions that would certainly not fit the model of Greek Love or the example of Alexander and Damien.
In the end, whatever you think about its subject, this book is beautifully written, extremely powerful and thoughtful. Be warned, it does not have a happy ending. I was heartbroken and extremely angry.
Firstly it is a work of fiction, the story of a great love and a heartbreaking and enraging tragedy. Alexander Aylmer is a extremely beautiful, intelligent and sensitive 13 then 14 year old boy student at Eton college at Windsor in England. He is from an aristocratic family and the son of a judge. He has a loving mother but a somewhat aloof father. Alexander’s mother dies suddenly while he is at Eton. Though heterosexual, Alexander has a relationship with a 17 year old fellow student, Julian Smith, the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has idealised the English and has worked extremely hard and made many sacrifices to get his son into Eton and take his place in English upper class society. Though Julian’s relationship with Alexander never becomes physical, it causes a scandal and Julian’s father forces him to end it.
Alexander’s despair at the sudden breakdown of his relationship with Julian is noticed by his English teacher Damien Cavendish. Damien is a 23 year old enthusiastic and caring English master newly arrived at Eton. He previously unjustly accused Alexander of lying about a late essay that has been shat on by a dog. Damien invited Alexander back to his flat for a talk during which Alexander breaks down and tells him all about what he has been going through since the death of his mother and his breakup with Julian. Damien allows Alexander to cry in his arms, the first physical affection Alexander has felt since the loss of his mother.
Damien allows Alexander to visit him in his flat whenever he wants to. The author makes it clear that both Alexander and Damien are heterosexual. In fact it is a slightly sour note in this book that in order to make that distinction, its portrayal of gay men is negative. Indeed it is made clearer as the story progresses that the mediocre and cowardly Julian is gay. Nevertheless, Alexander and Damien soon find themselves deeply in love with each other. The depth of their relationship completely relieves Alexander’s depression, increases his confidence and results in a spectacular improvement in his academic performance. Ultimately, fully at Alexander’s instigation, their relationship becomes sexual.
Secondly, this book aims to make a political point. Specifically, that there is nothing wrong with “pederasty”, that is, sexual relationships between men and “boys” meaning young post pubescent sexually aware teenagers, as opposed to “pedophilia”, sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. It argues the virtues of these relationships and that there is no place for interference by the law. More generally, the book argues that throughout history, people have sought to identify evil where often no evil exists purely in order to have something to stand shoulder to shoulder against, often in the process perpetrating far more evil than what they purport to be fighting.
In this argument, the book frequently references “Greek Love”, the custom in Ancient Greece that young men not marry until they are in their mid to late twenties, and before then seek out the customary role of mentor to a boy. It was also the role of a teenage boy to find such a mentor and the process was one of romance and courtship. The relationship was primarily educational but also involved love and sex. It is argued in this book and also elsewhere that this custom is the main reason that the cluster of small villages (in terms of population) that was Ancient Greece brought us so many great minds, poets, playwrights and artists that remain influential today.
Certainly the modern relationship between Alexander and Damian portrayed in the book fits very well into this ancient ideal and must be considered blameless and clearly of benefit to Alexander. Those who see evil and seek to “rescue” Alexander from “sexual abuse” ultimately become responsible for great tragedy and immeasurable evil.
Of course, one can not generalise too far from this. We hear many cases of sexual abuse of young teenagers and children at the hands of the staff of institutions that would certainly not fit the model of Greek Love or the example of Alexander and Damien.
In the end, whatever you think about its subject, this book is beautifully written, extremely powerful and thoughtful. Be warned, it does not have a happy ending. I was heartbroken and extremely angry.
February 26, 2016
The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
This extraordinary book recaptures like no other I have read recently how it feels to be a young, passionate, impulsive teenager: confused and thoroughly misunderstood in a world of dreary adults.
The powerful emotions portrayed here are not, like Wordsworth's, recollected in tranquillity but in a maelstrom of hormonal turbulence.
The story is simultaneously easy to read but desperately hard to endure, told in simple almost (appropriately enough) schoolboy language which conceals all the ecstasies, agonies and sturm und drang of this most difficult period of human development.
The prestigious public school setting, where conformity matters so much, serves to exacerbate the tension. The characters have to balance what their bodies and feelings are screaming at them to do along with "what the other chaps might think" and what is "the done thing, don't you know". Maybe it is not such a privilege attending a school whose purpose is to produce model citizens and future leaders of an increasingly decadent society at the expense of their own nature.
I know nothing of the author or what prompted him to write this recollection at this time, but I'm sure it won't have been for money or fame (or notoriety). There is a sense of catharsis about it all: an urgent need to get onto paper and so rid himself of painful baggage. Maybe like Proust, he dipped something into his tea which brought it all flooding back: not a 'petite madeleine', but perhaps an old meringue?
This extraordinary book recaptures like no other I have read recently how it feels to be a young, passionate, impulsive teenager: confused and thoroughly misunderstood in a world of dreary adults.
The powerful emotions portrayed here are not, like Wordsworth's, recollected in tranquillity but in a maelstrom of hormonal turbulence.
The story is simultaneously easy to read but desperately hard to endure, told in simple almost (appropriately enough) schoolboy language which conceals all the ecstasies, agonies and sturm und drang of this most difficult period of human development.
The prestigious public school setting, where conformity matters so much, serves to exacerbate the tension. The characters have to balance what their bodies and feelings are screaming at them to do along with "what the other chaps might think" and what is "the done thing, don't you know". Maybe it is not such a privilege attending a school whose purpose is to produce model citizens and future leaders of an increasingly decadent society at the expense of their own nature.
I know nothing of the author or what prompted him to write this recollection at this time, but I'm sure it won't have been for money or fame (or notoriety). There is a sense of catharsis about it all: an urgent need to get onto paper and so rid himself of painful baggage. Maybe like Proust, he dipped something into his tea which brought it all flooding back: not a 'petite madeleine', but perhaps an old meringue?
September 13, 2019
I enjoyed reading this novel, but it's worth noting what the book is not.
The book is not a gay coming-of-age story. In fact, the book is actively and curiously anti-gay throughout most of the text. It's the common error of pleading for social tolerance while demonstrating very little social tolerance in its own right.
The characters are not always believable or well drawn. At times they are shockingly naive and ignorant (especially given that the story in set in the early 1980s). And their naivete and ignorance is often inconsistent across the storyline.
The prose is very readable, albeit not especially beautiful or well written. There are lots of poetic euphemisms for sexual acts which may strike the reader as somewhat incongruent with the style of the rest of the novel. At times the book seems to want to be a 19th century novel, but its late 20th century setting is essential to its political and social agenda. But maybe one could see that dichotomy as reflective of Eton's continued existence.
The book is not a gay coming-of-age story. In fact, the book is actively and curiously anti-gay throughout most of the text. It's the common error of pleading for social tolerance while demonstrating very little social tolerance in its own right.
The characters are not always believable or well drawn. At times they are shockingly naive and ignorant (especially given that the story in set in the early 1980s). And their naivete and ignorance is often inconsistent across the storyline.
The prose is very readable, albeit not especially beautiful or well written. There are lots of poetic euphemisms for sexual acts which may strike the reader as somewhat incongruent with the style of the rest of the novel. At times the book seems to want to be a 19th century novel, but its late 20th century setting is essential to its political and social agenda. But maybe one could see that dichotomy as reflective of Eton's continued existence.
September 10, 2013
3.75
To echo other reviewers, a difficult subject handled well.
I admired the author's shifts in POV throughout the story, which made for a rich read. (Many readers complain about "head-popping" in books, which baffles me. We have the ability to follow multiple POVs in film and television--perhaps the maximum being HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones anyone?--so I don't understand why it's so jarring to so many readers when the same happens in books).
I couldn't rate this story as high as I wished because too often the dialogue between Damien and Alexander devolved into soap box talk. (The chat about the role of women in marriage was especially out of date and annoying.) The same problem occurred with the police dialogue. It was all too preachy to be believed.
Also, the sex scenes too often were described with painful prose. (Really, how many times can we suffer through the phrase "crystal liquid"?)
However, overall I enjoyed this.
To echo other reviewers, a difficult subject handled well.
I admired the author's shifts in POV throughout the story, which made for a rich read. (Many readers complain about "head-popping" in books, which baffles me. We have the ability to follow multiple POVs in film and television--perhaps the maximum being HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones anyone?--so I don't understand why it's so jarring to so many readers when the same happens in books).
I couldn't rate this story as high as I wished because too often the dialogue between Damien and Alexander devolved into soap box talk. (The chat about the role of women in marriage was especially out of date and annoying.) The same problem occurred with the police dialogue. It was all too preachy to be believed.
Also, the sex scenes too often were described with painful prose. (Really, how many times can we suffer through the phrase "crystal liquid"?)
However, overall I enjoyed this.
May 6, 2017
I enjoyed reading 'Alexander's Choice' greatly, especially for its absorbing me in the life of its characters. It got to the point where I was viscerally scared or frustrated or elated at various times and sometimes had to put the book down to recover my emotions. I really felt for the characters and the author does a fabulous job of making them well-rounded with interesting backstories that don't distract so that their motivations are understandable and I felt empathy even for those whose actions were harmful to Alexander, who I came to adore. The novel also puts the relationship between Alexander and Damian in context of the ideals of Greek Love, literally as well as figuratively.
June 21, 2016
The thing is, it had a lot of potential as a narrative. I really wanted to like it. But it was clearly black-and-white propaganda and the obviousness of this attempt really took away from the points it was trying to get across.
There was also a lesser problem with the pacing. Trivial explanations and unimportant character backgrounds (like Julian's mother) dragged on and on while the important parts were so rushed you could barely care about them and they came across as melodramatic rather than as heartbreaking.
It also, to me, seemed a but anachronistic. I had to remind myself multiple times that it was set in the 80s and not the 50s, for all except the last bit. I can't put my finger on why this is, though.
There was also a lesser problem with the pacing. Trivial explanations and unimportant character backgrounds (like Julian's mother) dragged on and on while the important parts were so rushed you could barely care about them and they came across as melodramatic rather than as heartbreaking.
It also, to me, seemed a but anachronistic. I had to remind myself multiple times that it was set in the 80s and not the 50s, for all except the last bit. I can't put my finger on why this is, though.
March 13, 2021
I quite enjoyed parts of this book, others not so much. Some hints of misogyny and even homophobia here and there. Sometimes felt uncomfortably like I was being intellectually groomed to sympathise with nonces (pedophiles) and that I'm afraid is the overarching agenda of this novel.
It's also very hard to take the majority of the reviews on this page seriously as they are evidently written by the same person.
It's also very hard to take the majority of the reviews on this page seriously as they are evidently written by the same person.
Read
October 19, 2021One of the darkest depressing books I've ever read.
I had to skip the entire final 2/3 of the book, as the author had made the switch to a lecture/moralizing mode of awfully dreadful and morbid character outcomes, abandoning the earlier lovely storyline entirely.
I had to skip the entire final 2/3 of the book, as the author had made the switch to a lecture/moralizing mode of awfully dreadful and morbid character outcomes, abandoning the earlier lovely storyline entirely.
April 8, 2018
Five stars. One of the greatest books I have ever read, but I would never recommend it to anyone because the ending was so painful. I am still crying when I think of it.
January 24, 2023
A novel at war with the spirit of its age
Edmund Marlowe’s Alexander’s Choice is a unique novel. There are other novels about boy-man-love, including ones that take a positive view, but I had never yet come across one that, ingeniously wrought in the form of a compelling story, makes such a complete, informed case for this love, contrasting two societies – classical Greece and the modern West – that have diametrically opposed takes on it. The present work is especially unique in regard of the immensely erudite apologia it delivers in novel format of Greek love as a very specific, beneficial social institution with historical antecedents, completely unrelated to the modern gay identity. Even readers who come away sceptical about the idealised tones with which Greek love is here presented cannot but understand that something is monstrously wrong with our supposedly progressive and enlightened society’s extreme, and escalating, response to it.
The juxtaposition of the ancient world and the modern one is cleverly achieved by letting the former weigh in on the latter insistently: through student Alexander Aylmer’s passion for ancient history, through the study of the classics undertaken at Eton, and through Mary Renault’s novels about Alexander the Great being discovered simultaneously by Aylmer and by his English teacher Damian Cavendish. Their mutual discovery of Greek love as a closely defined institution even begins to influence Damian at a point where he has come to terms with his love for Alexander, but still believes there is no sexual element to their mutual attraction: ‘If he did love Alexander, then presumably it must be love of the soul, and some would say that was the noblest love of all. In that case, could he not let himself go emotionally and give him all the benefits of Greek love, safe in the knowledge that his sexual feelings were chastely English?’ (p. 203).
The novel lets the reader feast on a succession of dramatic twists that never lets up: one is propelled forward throughout, and the narrative nowhere slackens. Part of what makes it compulsive reading is not just the unrelenting dramatic action, but the agonising, the manoeuvring and the second-guessing to which various characters give themselves over as they attempt to decide on the correct or most advantageous course of action, and as they journey in quest of the elusive fulfilment of their wishes and needs. As a result, the reader is kept on tenterhooks while it remains undecided whether the characters will finally end up getting what they long for.
Most characters, especially the main ones, are quite nuanced, their doubts and evolving views set out painstakingly. A fine example is Julian Smith’s father, who is good-natured and broad-minded and yet ends up convincing himself, and consequently his son, that the best way to proceed would be for Julian to betray his friendship with Alexander. It’s also quite clever for the author to have made Julian’s dad a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor who initially sees Britain as the tolerant antithesis of the nightmarish regime he has just barely escaped with his life from. As Britain’s punitive machinery is set in motion on the discovery of Alexander’s love affair, the novel thus draws a parallel of nightmarish, dehumanising systems that, even if using the Nazi atrocities as a warning is a more than well-trodden path, is valid and crystal-clear. Those lesser characters who are less than nuanced, such as inspector Hatchet, do not detract from the realism because they are still accurate, lacking all nuance and sophistication in real life as they do.
Of Peter Leigh, a boarder of low moral fibre who himself has experienced crushes on some of his schoolmates, it is said on page 110: ‘His own traumatic experience of last Half had reinforced his belief that the only way to get along in life was to make oneself as agreeable as possible to the acceptable arbiters of decent, sociable behaviour.’ Peter thus represents one end of a spectrum: those who suppress their own nature and conform to the prevailing morals and beliefs – no matter whether these are right or wrong. Julian is further along the spectrum and struggles actively to come to terms with his feelings and not to allow society to stifle their expression, although he ultimately fails. (I did jot down, having come to page 172: ‘I can't believe Julian could bring himself to go along with the pressure exerted to end his friendship with Alexander.’) Damian is on the other end of the spectrum, able through self-education to see beyond society’s prevailing myths and fallacies, and following his feelings, whether bravely or naively, in spite of the extreme risk he runs.
My main reservation in terms of believable character behaviour, aside from Julian’s U-turn just when he suspects that what he most craves is within imminent reach, concerns the amount of risk Damian chooses to run unnecessarily. It is puzzling how comparatively little such a perceptive and intelligent person as Damian worries about the need for discretion and caution given the grave consequences the consummation of his and Alexander’s love is certain to have if discovered. He blithely allows Alexander to spend every minute of his spare time in his teacher’s flat in the Eton High Street. This strange carelessness is accounted for to an extent by the circumstance that before meeting Alexander he was entirely unaware of any attraction to boys on his part (and thus he never paid attention to the phenomenon and the ramifications of its indulgence), by the fact that mad love spurs both himself and Alexander on in their tryst, by the fact that the novel is set in 1984; that is, still in the early, ‘naive’ days of the victimological era of extreme persecution, and by an observation made by Damian’s father: ‘being so giving himself, Damian had never had much idea of the malice of others’ (p. 209). Indeed, once his love affair is detected, Damian expects his promising teaching career to be over but is astounded when the police turn up at his flat to take him away.
The process by which Damian, initially without realising it, falls in love with Alexander is described impressively, making it clear how the process of falling in love begins in the subconscious and, after a time of sly incubation, bursts forth into our conscious awareness with bewildering and overwhelming suddenness: ‘He had to force himself to do his work, but when in the evening it was finished, a gloom settled on him which he could only alleviate by thinking of Alexander’s return on the morrow. It was this that finally made Damian realise he loved the boy to the depths of his soul. To try to pass his feelings off as mere fondness was ridiculous’ (p. 210).
Although the reader knows or at least suspects from the outset that a terrible drama is impending, the story avoids being predictable by introducing first fellow schoolboy Julian as Alexander’s special friend, and only then teacher Damian. One agonises along with Julian as he pursues bliss and gets tantalisingly far, but ultimately lets the pressure exerted on him by authority figures goad him into abandoning his dream and becoming a Judas. No sooner does this story line approach its climax than the suspenseful story of Alexander and Damian growing closer and closer to each other gets underway. At one point I thought it was Julian who, the enormity and irreversibility of his abandonment of Alexander having sunk in, might end up killing himself (and who knows, he may meet that fate some time after the novel ends). On page 317 his descent into despondency, and his awareness of it, is described impressively: ‘He sat in the armchair in his room in silent darkness, as if the light might expose the rottenness of his soul.’
In the end, however, it is Alexander’s suicide that is described with breathtaking realism. As early as page 12 there is a foreshadowing of a clash between Alexander’s wilful, principled nature and society’s implacable rules: ‘it looked as though he would defy as far as he thought practicable any rule he thought unreasonable.’ His ultimate fate is in a way an homage to Roger Peyrefitte’s famous special-friendships novel Les amitiés particulières (1943): Alexander, having exercised and fruitlessly defended his freedom of choice in matters of friendship and love, makes a final choice which mirrors the final choice made by Alexandre Motier in Les amitiés particulières. As a review by Cuthbert points out, however, Peyrefitte’s Alexandre makes his fateful decision because of a misunderstanding, whereas Marlowe’s Alexander makes his decision once he understands what society is really like. The only consequence the latter is too devastated to foresee is that, as a final act of desecration, his real murderers will pin the blame for his death on his lover.
Julian being presented as Alexander’s suitor before Damian comes into clear relief (puns intended) not only avoids predictability, but heightens the foreboding: first we see a looming drama about an older schoolboy’s love affair with a younger boy; then, to our astonishment, there rises up from behind it the story of a teacher’s love affair with a schoolboy, and we realise that the stakes have just become magnitudes greater. It was not until I had crossed the novel’s halfway mark that it sank in that Julian might end up being the jealous instrument of Alexander’s and Damian’s downfall.
Even if Alexander and Damian eventually take over as the story’s star-crossed lovers, a lot of its thrust is developed while the spotlight is still on Julian. There is much food for thought in his unspeakably melancholy realisation that he was born at the wrong time. This realisation is made salient by his discovery of Eton’s House Books from only two decades before his time, in which many an openly professed crush between older and younger schoolboys is attested to; a culture that had vanished by the 1980s. This is just one of the ways in which Edmund Marlowe’s insider knowledge of Eton is worked to great effect into the weft of the story, lending it an inimitable couleur locale. The following point is memorably made to characterise the contemporary society Julian comes to feel it is his misfortune to have been born into: ‘nowadays, safety is everything, and happiness and freedom must always give way to it’ (p. 267).
While he doesn't undergo a personal tragedy of the magnitude of Julian’s, Walter Cavendish (Damian’s father) is similarly shown to be disenchanted with his own time, in Walter’s case on discovering the illiberalism of many of the leftist comrades with whom he had gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War: ‘His disillusionment thereafter encompassed the entire drift of modern politics and society and he realised he was one of those unhappy men at war with the spirit of their age’ (p. 204). The novel is essentially about people finding themselves, willy-nilly, at war with the spirit of their age, and about the question whether, given this conflict, they will choose to exercise their freedom nonetheless – one of the choices faced by Alexander as well as by Julian and Damian – or to surrender it by way of a peace offering to society. (In parallel, housemaster Mr. Hodgson and headmaster Mr. Allenby face choices as they, too, come to realise just how counterproductively extreme society’s response to underage and age-discrepant love has become.)
One aspect of the said spirit of the age is formulated arrestingly on page 409:‘a world in which all moral questions were being answered with final certainty thanks to progress.’ This ‘brave new world’ of concerned members of society, news outlets growing fat on fanning the flames of persecution, activist social workers, the mandatory involvement of the police, mountain-out-of-molehill mandatory sentencing, and other ever-escalating solutions to neutralise predators is consummately raked over the coals in the final stages of the novel. No less consummate, and informed, is the evocation of a very different world that met its demise only in the recent past: the public schools where Greek love affairs were allowed to flourish, or turned a blind eye to, before new sexual identities and external political pressures put a virtual end to this centuries-old arrangement.
Alexander’s Choice is not, however, just a tragic, bitter tale of individuals being crushed by society; it’s not just ‘a novel to slit your wrists to’. Ample space is devoted to the evolving thoughts, beliefs, needs, wishes, curiosities, follies, griefs, hopes and desires of characters such as Alexander, Julian and Damian, but also of such characters as Alexander’s newly widowed father and Julian’s father, who wants above all for his only son to get the top education that was never available to himself. In setting out all of these inner lives, the novel is interested in exploring which other characters can bring fulfilment to a given person and which, by contrast, threaten to frustrate the sought fulfilment. Julian, himself a bit of an ugly duckling, jumps at the opportunity to show his chivalrous side, is elated by the experience of friendship with someone as sensitive and attractive as Alexander and is dying to know what it would be like to have sex with him.
Alexander is the character whose inner life is described in greatest detail, and is arguably the most tormented, having to cope with his mother’s sudden death and having a sensitive, trusting nature that sets him up for disappointment. He craves someone who will love him and whom he can rely on to be there for him. In addition to this, he is frustrated because his desire for sex with a girl remains unfulfilled. Initially, the person supplying his emotional need is Julian; afterwards it’s Damian. Damian, for his part, is a born giver of love, protection and knowledge. He feels fulfilled when he can lavish his instinct to nurture on Alexander; the latter in turn comes to life under Damian’s attention. The way these different emotions and needs play out in the passionate love relationship that quickly develops between the two, the way sex is not the object or the starting point but is discovered by both as a natural vehicle for their devotion to one another, and the way both partners are transformed by the mystical workings of love and desire, is developed in great detail and with great care. In this novel, individuals fall deep in their despair and loneliness, but are also lifted up high through the help, altruism and kindness of others (another example is the non-sexual friendship of Julian’s father Alfred with Captain Holland, his English liberator when as a teenager Alfred was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp).
As far as the philosophical points developed in the novel – not necessarily the author’s points of view, but still setting a tone – I found myself raising an eyebrow at the following reflection by Damian (p. 188): ‘Much as they [gay students at Cambridge] had tried hard to give an impression of having a good time, he had felt sure that a tinge of sadness underlay their gaiety and he suspected that its ultimate pointlessness was the cause.’ The alleged sad, depressing and dead-end nature of the homosexual lifestyle is a well-worn trope employed by those who oppose homosexuality across the board, regardless of the ages involved; I was sad to see it invoked by Damian.
Another reservation that suggested itself to me is that, with the novel’s emphasis on explaining Greek love as a highly specific, time-honoured social mechanism often indulged in by men and boys who are precisely not principally homosexual (let alone ‘gay’), some readers may come away with a reinforced impression that Greek love relationships are, at best, highly transient and that the boy, on sprouting hair in unacceptable places, will be predictably left in the lurch. The novel goes to some length explaining why the transient nature of such relationships is a feature, not a bug (it allows the boy, having been nurtured at a time of need, to move on to – usually – heterosexual life, and the sexual relationship often morphs into lifelong friendship), but it does not address the sheer variety of human relational and sexual expressions out there: just like not all homosexual and bisexual persons fit in with the contemporary ideal of the androphile gay and his jealously defended wedding cake, not all boy lovers stop being sexually attracted to boys when the latter reach a certain cut-off point.
The novel being highly didactic might be experienced by some readers as a drawback, and some will argue that the characters – chiefly Alexander – only act the way they do in service of the crusading author’s agenda (one review calls all characters different ‘avatars’ of Marlowe). In the interest of its didactic quest, the story presents a number of exemplary outcomes, which can be categorised as either the most utopian or the most dystopian of a range of possible outcomes: Alexander is flawlessly beautiful and extremely noble; Damian is maximally attractive and selflessly caring; both are impassioned by the classical world and enlightened by compelling descriptions of the practice of Greek love; they experience the most ideal connection of souls and bodies imaginable; Alexander gets physically assaulted and abused by the police; he takes his own life in response to the outside intervention in his happiness and his needs; Damian gets killed in prison for being seen as so much worse than any other class of criminal. All taken together, these exemplary outcomes could be seen as painting an unrealistic picture and as only being marshalled by the author in the interest of presenting the ultimate apologia of Greek love and indictment of our 1984-style – with regard to this subject – society.
Alexander’s Choice does not pull punches, unflinchingly delving into the single-most controversial issue in contemporary society. I was from the early stages of reading it, and have remained, extremely impressed and moved by it. I find it, I’ll say it again, a novel not quite like any other I’ve ever come across. It does not just describe a tragedy – as well as great beauty and the fulfilment of love, however briefly – but lays out the nature of that tragedy, how it came about, how things were once different, and how things might be different again if it weren’t for the fact that individuals and human societies are impervious to reason and incapable of compassion when our ritualistic, expiatory need for sacrificing scapegoats is at stake. Alexander’s Choice is magnificent and unforgettable.
Edmund Marlowe’s Alexander’s Choice is a unique novel. There are other novels about boy-man-love, including ones that take a positive view, but I had never yet come across one that, ingeniously wrought in the form of a compelling story, makes such a complete, informed case for this love, contrasting two societies – classical Greece and the modern West – that have diametrically opposed takes on it. The present work is especially unique in regard of the immensely erudite apologia it delivers in novel format of Greek love as a very specific, beneficial social institution with historical antecedents, completely unrelated to the modern gay identity. Even readers who come away sceptical about the idealised tones with which Greek love is here presented cannot but understand that something is monstrously wrong with our supposedly progressive and enlightened society’s extreme, and escalating, response to it.
The juxtaposition of the ancient world and the modern one is cleverly achieved by letting the former weigh in on the latter insistently: through student Alexander Aylmer’s passion for ancient history, through the study of the classics undertaken at Eton, and through Mary Renault’s novels about Alexander the Great being discovered simultaneously by Aylmer and by his English teacher Damian Cavendish. Their mutual discovery of Greek love as a closely defined institution even begins to influence Damian at a point where he has come to terms with his love for Alexander, but still believes there is no sexual element to their mutual attraction: ‘If he did love Alexander, then presumably it must be love of the soul, and some would say that was the noblest love of all. In that case, could he not let himself go emotionally and give him all the benefits of Greek love, safe in the knowledge that his sexual feelings were chastely English?’ (p. 203).
The novel lets the reader feast on a succession of dramatic twists that never lets up: one is propelled forward throughout, and the narrative nowhere slackens. Part of what makes it compulsive reading is not just the unrelenting dramatic action, but the agonising, the manoeuvring and the second-guessing to which various characters give themselves over as they attempt to decide on the correct or most advantageous course of action, and as they journey in quest of the elusive fulfilment of their wishes and needs. As a result, the reader is kept on tenterhooks while it remains undecided whether the characters will finally end up getting what they long for.
Most characters, especially the main ones, are quite nuanced, their doubts and evolving views set out painstakingly. A fine example is Julian Smith’s father, who is good-natured and broad-minded and yet ends up convincing himself, and consequently his son, that the best way to proceed would be for Julian to betray his friendship with Alexander. It’s also quite clever for the author to have made Julian’s dad a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor who initially sees Britain as the tolerant antithesis of the nightmarish regime he has just barely escaped with his life from. As Britain’s punitive machinery is set in motion on the discovery of Alexander’s love affair, the novel thus draws a parallel of nightmarish, dehumanising systems that, even if using the Nazi atrocities as a warning is a more than well-trodden path, is valid and crystal-clear. Those lesser characters who are less than nuanced, such as inspector Hatchet, do not detract from the realism because they are still accurate, lacking all nuance and sophistication in real life as they do.
Of Peter Leigh, a boarder of low moral fibre who himself has experienced crushes on some of his schoolmates, it is said on page 110: ‘His own traumatic experience of last Half had reinforced his belief that the only way to get along in life was to make oneself as agreeable as possible to the acceptable arbiters of decent, sociable behaviour.’ Peter thus represents one end of a spectrum: those who suppress their own nature and conform to the prevailing morals and beliefs – no matter whether these are right or wrong. Julian is further along the spectrum and struggles actively to come to terms with his feelings and not to allow society to stifle their expression, although he ultimately fails. (I did jot down, having come to page 172: ‘I can't believe Julian could bring himself to go along with the pressure exerted to end his friendship with Alexander.’) Damian is on the other end of the spectrum, able through self-education to see beyond society’s prevailing myths and fallacies, and following his feelings, whether bravely or naively, in spite of the extreme risk he runs.
My main reservation in terms of believable character behaviour, aside from Julian’s U-turn just when he suspects that what he most craves is within imminent reach, concerns the amount of risk Damian chooses to run unnecessarily. It is puzzling how comparatively little such a perceptive and intelligent person as Damian worries about the need for discretion and caution given the grave consequences the consummation of his and Alexander’s love is certain to have if discovered. He blithely allows Alexander to spend every minute of his spare time in his teacher’s flat in the Eton High Street. This strange carelessness is accounted for to an extent by the circumstance that before meeting Alexander he was entirely unaware of any attraction to boys on his part (and thus he never paid attention to the phenomenon and the ramifications of its indulgence), by the fact that mad love spurs both himself and Alexander on in their tryst, by the fact that the novel is set in 1984; that is, still in the early, ‘naive’ days of the victimological era of extreme persecution, and by an observation made by Damian’s father: ‘being so giving himself, Damian had never had much idea of the malice of others’ (p. 209). Indeed, once his love affair is detected, Damian expects his promising teaching career to be over but is astounded when the police turn up at his flat to take him away.
The process by which Damian, initially without realising it, falls in love with Alexander is described impressively, making it clear how the process of falling in love begins in the subconscious and, after a time of sly incubation, bursts forth into our conscious awareness with bewildering and overwhelming suddenness: ‘He had to force himself to do his work, but when in the evening it was finished, a gloom settled on him which he could only alleviate by thinking of Alexander’s return on the morrow. It was this that finally made Damian realise he loved the boy to the depths of his soul. To try to pass his feelings off as mere fondness was ridiculous’ (p. 210).
Although the reader knows or at least suspects from the outset that a terrible drama is impending, the story avoids being predictable by introducing first fellow schoolboy Julian as Alexander’s special friend, and only then teacher Damian. One agonises along with Julian as he pursues bliss and gets tantalisingly far, but ultimately lets the pressure exerted on him by authority figures goad him into abandoning his dream and becoming a Judas. No sooner does this story line approach its climax than the suspenseful story of Alexander and Damian growing closer and closer to each other gets underway. At one point I thought it was Julian who, the enormity and irreversibility of his abandonment of Alexander having sunk in, might end up killing himself (and who knows, he may meet that fate some time after the novel ends). On page 317 his descent into despondency, and his awareness of it, is described impressively: ‘He sat in the armchair in his room in silent darkness, as if the light might expose the rottenness of his soul.’
In the end, however, it is Alexander’s suicide that is described with breathtaking realism. As early as page 12 there is a foreshadowing of a clash between Alexander’s wilful, principled nature and society’s implacable rules: ‘it looked as though he would defy as far as he thought practicable any rule he thought unreasonable.’ His ultimate fate is in a way an homage to Roger Peyrefitte’s famous special-friendships novel Les amitiés particulières (1943): Alexander, having exercised and fruitlessly defended his freedom of choice in matters of friendship and love, makes a final choice which mirrors the final choice made by Alexandre Motier in Les amitiés particulières. As a review by Cuthbert points out, however, Peyrefitte’s Alexandre makes his fateful decision because of a misunderstanding, whereas Marlowe’s Alexander makes his decision once he understands what society is really like. The only consequence the latter is too devastated to foresee is that, as a final act of desecration, his real murderers will pin the blame for his death on his lover.
Julian being presented as Alexander’s suitor before Damian comes into clear relief (puns intended) not only avoids predictability, but heightens the foreboding: first we see a looming drama about an older schoolboy’s love affair with a younger boy; then, to our astonishment, there rises up from behind it the story of a teacher’s love affair with a schoolboy, and we realise that the stakes have just become magnitudes greater. It was not until I had crossed the novel’s halfway mark that it sank in that Julian might end up being the jealous instrument of Alexander’s and Damian’s downfall.
Even if Alexander and Damian eventually take over as the story’s star-crossed lovers, a lot of its thrust is developed while the spotlight is still on Julian. There is much food for thought in his unspeakably melancholy realisation that he was born at the wrong time. This realisation is made salient by his discovery of Eton’s House Books from only two decades before his time, in which many an openly professed crush between older and younger schoolboys is attested to; a culture that had vanished by the 1980s. This is just one of the ways in which Edmund Marlowe’s insider knowledge of Eton is worked to great effect into the weft of the story, lending it an inimitable couleur locale. The following point is memorably made to characterise the contemporary society Julian comes to feel it is his misfortune to have been born into: ‘nowadays, safety is everything, and happiness and freedom must always give way to it’ (p. 267).
While he doesn't undergo a personal tragedy of the magnitude of Julian’s, Walter Cavendish (Damian’s father) is similarly shown to be disenchanted with his own time, in Walter’s case on discovering the illiberalism of many of the leftist comrades with whom he had gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War: ‘His disillusionment thereafter encompassed the entire drift of modern politics and society and he realised he was one of those unhappy men at war with the spirit of their age’ (p. 204). The novel is essentially about people finding themselves, willy-nilly, at war with the spirit of their age, and about the question whether, given this conflict, they will choose to exercise their freedom nonetheless – one of the choices faced by Alexander as well as by Julian and Damian – or to surrender it by way of a peace offering to society. (In parallel, housemaster Mr. Hodgson and headmaster Mr. Allenby face choices as they, too, come to realise just how counterproductively extreme society’s response to underage and age-discrepant love has become.)
One aspect of the said spirit of the age is formulated arrestingly on page 409:‘a world in which all moral questions were being answered with final certainty thanks to progress.’ This ‘brave new world’ of concerned members of society, news outlets growing fat on fanning the flames of persecution, activist social workers, the mandatory involvement of the police, mountain-out-of-molehill mandatory sentencing, and other ever-escalating solutions to neutralise predators is consummately raked over the coals in the final stages of the novel. No less consummate, and informed, is the evocation of a very different world that met its demise only in the recent past: the public schools where Greek love affairs were allowed to flourish, or turned a blind eye to, before new sexual identities and external political pressures put a virtual end to this centuries-old arrangement.
Alexander’s Choice is not, however, just a tragic, bitter tale of individuals being crushed by society; it’s not just ‘a novel to slit your wrists to’. Ample space is devoted to the evolving thoughts, beliefs, needs, wishes, curiosities, follies, griefs, hopes and desires of characters such as Alexander, Julian and Damian, but also of such characters as Alexander’s newly widowed father and Julian’s father, who wants above all for his only son to get the top education that was never available to himself. In setting out all of these inner lives, the novel is interested in exploring which other characters can bring fulfilment to a given person and which, by contrast, threaten to frustrate the sought fulfilment. Julian, himself a bit of an ugly duckling, jumps at the opportunity to show his chivalrous side, is elated by the experience of friendship with someone as sensitive and attractive as Alexander and is dying to know what it would be like to have sex with him.
Alexander is the character whose inner life is described in greatest detail, and is arguably the most tormented, having to cope with his mother’s sudden death and having a sensitive, trusting nature that sets him up for disappointment. He craves someone who will love him and whom he can rely on to be there for him. In addition to this, he is frustrated because his desire for sex with a girl remains unfulfilled. Initially, the person supplying his emotional need is Julian; afterwards it’s Damian. Damian, for his part, is a born giver of love, protection and knowledge. He feels fulfilled when he can lavish his instinct to nurture on Alexander; the latter in turn comes to life under Damian’s attention. The way these different emotions and needs play out in the passionate love relationship that quickly develops between the two, the way sex is not the object or the starting point but is discovered by both as a natural vehicle for their devotion to one another, and the way both partners are transformed by the mystical workings of love and desire, is developed in great detail and with great care. In this novel, individuals fall deep in their despair and loneliness, but are also lifted up high through the help, altruism and kindness of others (another example is the non-sexual friendship of Julian’s father Alfred with Captain Holland, his English liberator when as a teenager Alfred was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp).
As far as the philosophical points developed in the novel – not necessarily the author’s points of view, but still setting a tone – I found myself raising an eyebrow at the following reflection by Damian (p. 188): ‘Much as they [gay students at Cambridge] had tried hard to give an impression of having a good time, he had felt sure that a tinge of sadness underlay their gaiety and he suspected that its ultimate pointlessness was the cause.’ The alleged sad, depressing and dead-end nature of the homosexual lifestyle is a well-worn trope employed by those who oppose homosexuality across the board, regardless of the ages involved; I was sad to see it invoked by Damian.
Another reservation that suggested itself to me is that, with the novel’s emphasis on explaining Greek love as a highly specific, time-honoured social mechanism often indulged in by men and boys who are precisely not principally homosexual (let alone ‘gay’), some readers may come away with a reinforced impression that Greek love relationships are, at best, highly transient and that the boy, on sprouting hair in unacceptable places, will be predictably left in the lurch. The novel goes to some length explaining why the transient nature of such relationships is a feature, not a bug (it allows the boy, having been nurtured at a time of need, to move on to – usually – heterosexual life, and the sexual relationship often morphs into lifelong friendship), but it does not address the sheer variety of human relational and sexual expressions out there: just like not all homosexual and bisexual persons fit in with the contemporary ideal of the androphile gay and his jealously defended wedding cake, not all boy lovers stop being sexually attracted to boys when the latter reach a certain cut-off point.
The novel being highly didactic might be experienced by some readers as a drawback, and some will argue that the characters – chiefly Alexander – only act the way they do in service of the crusading author’s agenda (one review calls all characters different ‘avatars’ of Marlowe). In the interest of its didactic quest, the story presents a number of exemplary outcomes, which can be categorised as either the most utopian or the most dystopian of a range of possible outcomes: Alexander is flawlessly beautiful and extremely noble; Damian is maximally attractive and selflessly caring; both are impassioned by the classical world and enlightened by compelling descriptions of the practice of Greek love; they experience the most ideal connection of souls and bodies imaginable; Alexander gets physically assaulted and abused by the police; he takes his own life in response to the outside intervention in his happiness and his needs; Damian gets killed in prison for being seen as so much worse than any other class of criminal. All taken together, these exemplary outcomes could be seen as painting an unrealistic picture and as only being marshalled by the author in the interest of presenting the ultimate apologia of Greek love and indictment of our 1984-style – with regard to this subject – society.
Alexander’s Choice does not pull punches, unflinchingly delving into the single-most controversial issue in contemporary society. I was from the early stages of reading it, and have remained, extremely impressed and moved by it. I find it, I’ll say it again, a novel not quite like any other I’ve ever come across. It does not just describe a tragedy – as well as great beauty and the fulfilment of love, however briefly – but lays out the nature of that tragedy, how it came about, how things were once different, and how things might be different again if it weren’t for the fact that individuals and human societies are impervious to reason and incapable of compassion when our ritualistic, expiatory need for sacrificing scapegoats is at stake. Alexander’s Choice is magnificent and unforgettable.
July 6, 2023
Daring and poignant...a controversial but worthwhile read for me.
May 27, 2015
Difficult review—Pending
7 of 10 stars
7 of 10 stars
January 24, 2019
This is one book that could open up a large can of worms when it comes to a debate a fictional tale of pederasty in the 20th century between 14 year old Alexander Aylmer a pupil at Eton And his English tutor 23 year old Damien Cavendish. fictional maybe but in the real world these things do exist With regards to the relationship some would say the boy was groomed But on the other hand others would argue it's what the boy pushed for whatever its a tale that's ends up in tragedy then the blame game begins a mixture of want failure jealousy torment and tragic and violent deaths A boy who shows at first interest in girls before reading about historic events in Greece when Man Boy love was classed as normal and soon after fell in love with his English tutor who has comforted him after the recent death of his Mother With Alexander now given A key to Damien's home Alexander soon has his feet under the table and after a lot of coaxing and pleading with Damien also in bed Enter Julian Smith A 17 year old student who had tried and failed to make Alexander his own showing jealousy that he had missed out then shadowing Alexander and seeing him go in to the flats where Damien lived although having no evidence on why Alexander was there puts 2 and 2 together and sends an anonymous letter to Alexander's head of year Now the real trouble starts with terrible consequences for both man and boy lovers For Alexander his argument is why can't he make his own decisions without anybody interfering there was also the actions of the police that bring into question regards to conduct in the way they treated Alexander plus soon after social services trying to force Alexander into what they wanted to hear So now to the can of worms I spoke about in Greece at the time of Alexander the Great sex between man and boy was as normal as sex today between man and woman this being the point Alexander made in trying to defend his man lover so why could it not apply in the present day as he had pressed for the relationship with his tutor So the big question the law says it's a criminal offence for any adult to have sex with a person under the age of 16 or whatever age limit is set in various countries Take here in the UK as another reader pointed out even children get arrested and charged for sex contact with other children But is that truly abuse or is it just children being children As for the Alexander situation should there be some leeway for children to have a say in what they choose in life including sexual partners if they feel confident and safe enough Now not for one moment am I saying young children should be allowed to mix with a older person for sexual pleasure for example a 5 or 6 year old would be fooled into thinking its some sort of game and that could not be condoned in any way shape or form But as they get older and start to experiment could they be trusted to know their own feelings and be able to make up their own minds on what they like and don't like What do I think well As a victim of abuse in my teens I would be on the fence in the 80s male rape was unheard of but in the present day L.G.B.T is a very much considered subject sex education is very much more taught today from when I was at school AND Children are more aware these days then I was in my young days and should you see my review on Don't tell the sexual abuse of boys you may get a inkling why I'm sitting on the fence on this subject well things have changed 40 years on Let the debate begin
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 15, 2025
Mr. Marlowe has crafted a truly deep and haunting story that shattered my heart in its final chapters. Before those final chapters is a beautifully written tale about love, loss, perseverance, intellect, and the pursuit for Truth and Beauty whatever the outcome. The progression of the story touches on the necessary points of a greek-love relationship which is important to contemplate but more than that it outlines the human experience in its most raw emotions and the possibilities of such passion and support. Throughout the book we get to witness the characters wrestle with the moral and social issues of their lives and loves and what we see and experience is pure and honest.
I truly loved reading this book and getting to witness such an honest and loving relationship bloom page by page. The final pages are incredibly hard to read and the terror that enuses is an all too harsh reality of the real world that is not only scary but feels, to the absolute root molecule of humanity, wrong.
I highly recommend this book, just be warned that your heart will break. That you may find yourself ugly crying pages after you thought your heart couldn't feel fuller of love and joy as I found myself.
I truly loved reading this book and getting to witness such an honest and loving relationship bloom page by page. The final pages are incredibly hard to read and the terror that enuses is an all too harsh reality of the real world that is not only scary but feels, to the absolute root molecule of humanity, wrong.
I highly recommend this book, just be warned that your heart will break. That you may find yourself ugly crying pages after you thought your heart couldn't feel fuller of love and joy as I found myself.
April 14, 2018
I guess I have been spoiled by some school/college movies (and a Simpsons episode) that end with a « Where are they now ». My inner Annie Wilkes won't rest until I can read what happens to Julian Smith later on in his life. He is in his late forties and I need to know if he has found some peace of mind and if he can let go of the past. Mr. Marlowe, please, please, please...
September 7, 2018
Beautiful story realistically presented. Not the most optimistic story of this sort, unfortunately. Many of these stories exist that don't end happily. I would love to see a more of these intricate dispellings of the concept of man-boy love that opt to not demonize anyone - but rather humanize from all sides. While one could argue that Marlowe here writes in a voice that garners a sense of curiosity or mystery, one mustn't forget that such a love is considered worthy of death from the perspective of most of mainstream society. What I liked about this book, though, was that it was clear to me that not everyone was perfect. Everyone had flaws. Boys, themselves, are flawed by nature in the way that they carry themselves as well as the way they view the world. However, everyone in this book seems to have that in common, and I was thankful to see that so wisely conveyed. So thank you, Marlowe, for writing this story. Definitely kept the wheels in my head going!
December 26, 2023
Until quite near the shattering end of this unusual and deeply moving love story, it felt so real that I thought it was probably all true. I would still guess that most of it is, and that it was written for cathartic reasons.
June 12, 2025
Powerful
I won't say much and spoil the book for others who have yet to read it. I loved this book and was deeply shocked by the unexpectedly events that unfold. The best read for me in some time.
I won't say much and spoil the book for others who have yet to read it. I loved this book and was deeply shocked by the unexpectedly events that unfold. The best read for me in some time.
December 17, 2023
John Hamilton, in his review of this book, said everything I could say or possibly want to say. Therefore nothing more to add except a profound thanks to Edmund Marlowe.
January 28, 2014
Thought provoking, but ultimately an incomplete coverage of a difficult subject.
August 5, 2013
A difficult subject, but very well written.
Read
July 1, 2016One of the most entertaining books I have ever read.
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