P.Viktor

Boy George – Straight, Review

The second book I read during January was Boy George’s Straight (2005). This is his second instalment of autobiography, coming ten years after his brilliant book Take It Like A Man (1995). The latter volume covered George’s childhood, his family, his difficult teenage years, and his breakout success in Culture Club. I was sixteen when it was published and it came out at the same time as one of his best albums, Cheapness and Beauty. Their effect on me as a gay teenager desperate to get out of the small town I lived in was immeasurable. The parallels with our upbringing (in terms of being gay) was uncanny and I felt a palpable sense of relief that someone else had similar experiences to me when I was young and knowing I wasn’t the only one who had been through them was a solace. It also covered the territory of George’s relationship with an ostensibly straight man, the drummer of Culture Club, Jon Moss. Being in love with a straight boy at the time, a much-unrequited love, it helped put my own feelings into perspective.

Will Self – Dorian, An Imitation, Review

“Baz thought that he embodied the dawning age of ‘gay liberation’, and that his video installation of Dorian would become an icon of all that was beautiful and true and important about the inverted ‘lifestyle’. In fact, what has happened is quite the reverse: instead of this cathode portrait’s going on show and attracting praise, it has languished somewhere in a darkened room. Meanwhile, it’s the portrait’s subject who has become a kind of sadistic genius, exhibiting an infinite capacity for causing pain”. Will Self, Dorian (2002)

Will Self’s Dorian is the first book I read for a project that will see me reading 25 books in 2010, alongside my fellow blogger Dan, whose This Man’s World has been one of my favourite blogs since I started in 2005. I have developed a friendship with its author mainly over our love for all things Madonna related, and it was he who set this challenge up. We both recognised that we spent way too much time on the internet and not enough reading books. I chose Dorian after recently seeing the rather mediocre film version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (2009). The film, although starting off quite well, fell into the usual Hollywood melodrama and lost all the nuances of Wilde’s original work despite the excellent cast of Colin Firth and Ben Barnes (who looked the part but also appeared to be as two-dimensional as the eponymous portrait). In any case, it led me to pick up Will Self’s book which was one of those purchases I made out of curiosity (at the Oxford Literary Festival in fact) but which languished on my shelf forever and a day. Now seemed as a good a time as any to pick it up.

The Kenneth Williams Diaries

“The preoccupation with diary writing is caused by various things: the desire to keep a record which can be useful later, and committing to paper what can’t be communicated to a mentor… oh! all kinds of reasons, but fundamentally it is about loneliness”. Tuesday, 8 March 1988.

In February I saw the BBC3 drama Fantabulosa, a portrayal of Kenneth Williams based on his diaries. Michael Sheen’s performance is quite spectacular – he manages to capture the man without imitating or caricaturing him. Throughout the programme Sheen narrates directly from the diaries, and it so it gives the whole affair a very intimate, personal feel, and offers a picture of William’s rarely seen before. I bought the diaries some years ago, I think after I had seen a documentary about William’s life, which was one of the first to change the popular perception of the comic actor. At eight hundred pages I left it on the shelf gathering dust, perhaps never having enough time to do them justice. After seeing Fatabulosa my curiosity led me back to them. I wanted to know more about this man who I had always had huge affection for and laughed and giggled with in my childhood during the Carry Ons, Jackanory, and Willo’the’Wisp, the man who brought laughter to so many but who had very little for himself. 

Kenneth Williams is widely known for his comic performances, his high camp, his outrageousness, and his forgivable rudeness. He had excellent comedy timing, and in the Carry Ons he was the one actor you often looked forward to seeing. But the man, like many comics seem to be, was a deeply unhappy individual. He was a gay man caught in a time when homosexuality was still illegal, and even though times moved on and homosexuality was decriminalised, he still met with great disdain and reproach in a Britain that was still largely racist and homophobic. He was extremely religious and had a fervent belief in god, and this was also at odds with his homosexuality. It is widely believed (and the diaries support this) that he remained a virgin his whole life. His relationships, if one could ever call them that, were brief misunderstandings and humiliations, and yet ironically, the one thing he always wanted was a partner that he could love and who could love him. But, because of these conflicts within him, and his inability to commit emotionally and sexually, it never happened, and that does seem the greatest tragedy of his life.

Ian McEwan - On Chesil Beach

I have been a fan of McEwan’s since I read Black Dogs (1998) during a Postmodernism module for my English degree. I hated the module, but I loved the book, reading it in one sitting and feeling horrible envious at McEwan’s terse prose and narrative skill. Ten years later and I am still in awe having read much of his output in the interim. He is probably one of the very few living writers I actually get excited about, and since Atonement (2001), generally considered the start of his ‘mature period’, I have been eagerly anticipating his latest novel. Well, as eagerly as waiting for the paperback edition to come out (I have never been a fan of the hardback book – so cumbersome, so intractable, so expensive). Having been very patient I recently bought On Chesil Beach, released last year, and it is by far one of the finest works in this vaunted period of maturity.

Relatively short at 166 pages (Atonement was twice as long), the novel tells the story of Edward and Florence, two young newly weds, who have arrived in a Devonshire hotel for their wedding night. What would normally be a moment of great excitement and anticipation turns, in a very McEwanian way, into a nightmare of frustrations, misinterpretations, and horrifying revelations. What I have always admired about McEwan is the way he is able to take such a basic premise and turn it, by some literary alchemy, into a gripping story, an effect most notable in his gripping thriller Enduring Love (1997).