A vivid period tale of improbably edifying debauchery.
Gay men in Victorian Britain fight homophobia by becoming sex workers in this historical novel.
In 1881, with gay sexual acts illegal in Britain, 24-year-old Jack Branson is exiled from his Irish village when his mother catches him in a gay “Incident”; he washes up in London. There, he works as a low-paid telegram courier, languishing in a nasty room and sending letters and money to his parents but never receiving a reply. His fortunes improve when he becomes a sex worker, visiting clients under cover of delivering fake telegrams. The money’s great, and the gay sex makes him “feel complete” in his “own skin.” He finds true love with Oliver Hawkett, a young thief with a vision of opening gay brothels as a way of normalizing gay sexuality “until the world gets so used to us that they toss those wicked laws and let us live as equals.” When police arrest Jack at a 30-man orgy, he flees to Ireland to spend two years as a footman until he’s outed and returns to London. He then joins Oliver’s newly opened brothel, arranges for protection payments to a Scotland Yard superintendent who is his client, and stars in group-sex sessions with aristocrats. Feeling as if he has found his true home, Jack writes about his adventures and the varieties of gay sexual experiences among his fellow sex workers, including a man who lost his leg in childhood when his mother tied him to a railroad track after learning he was gay. The resulting anonymously published novel, The Sins of an Irishman in London, sells well but precipitates a libel suit by a closeted Tory politician. Jack’s unapologetic testimony at trial—“I shag men for money”—sounds a clarion call for gay liberation.
Schulze’s yarn is a sentimentalized takeoff on the doings of real-life sex worker Jack Saul, who inspired a similar piece of Victorian erotica titled The Sins of the Cities of the Plain and testified in a libel case. Schulze’s depiction of the Victorian era is atmospheric and intense in conveying the persecution gay people faced. But it is studded with anachronisms both linguistic—“Gossip’s as viral as a blight,” Jack says several years before viruses were discovered—and monetary. (Jack sends his mother five pounds sterling every day for years, which in modern money is the equivalent of about $870 per day, while living in a slum.) The author’s prose is workmanlike, with explicit, fairly rote pornographic scenes—“ ‘Harder!’ Andy yelled at the blond. ‘Harder!’ ”—and some passages that are more evocative and lyrical. (“Have you ever been the only sober man in a pub of drunks? It’s exciting, like an opera. There’s music in their movements, their camaraderie, their sad stories.”) Unfortunately, Jack’s relationship with his sexuality doesn’t always ring true. He’s an emotionally volatile man, always agonizing over his relationship with Oliver and frequently breaking down in tears, but at the same time he’s a happy sex worker in a brothel so noble that he compares it to King Arthur’s Round Table. (François: “Don’t you want to save the brothel?” Jack: “I want to save it, François. I just don’t think I can.”) Readers may find this portrait of Victorian sex workers too blithely romantic to be convincing.
A vivid period tale of improbably edifying debauchery.Pub Date: April 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73703-782-8
Page Count: 426
Publisher: David Schulze Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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