Fifteen or twenty years ago I read a lot of literary fiction. At some point I stopped, mostly because I was tired of reading books about bad things happening to characters I either liked very much and didn't want to see hurt, or didn't care about and so therefore there was little meaning to it. This book isn't exactly that. But it's closer to gay literary fiction than most of the books about queer relationships that I tend to gravitate toward, but with a strange and at times vaguely out of place villain that didn't always fit the rest of the story. Having said all that, I still enjoyed it quite a lot.
The story focuses on Harry Cane, an Englishman in the late Nineteenth Century, who marries and has a child and comes from wealth and so doesn't need anything as common as employment. His life just seems to meander along until he meets a man who sees something in him that he didn't quite know himself. They begin sleeping together, and Harry is almost charmingly naive about the entire thing, not really recognizing how dangerous his behavior is until it's discovered and someone tries to blackmail him. He decides to leave the country in order to spare his family the shame, with little protest from his wife, and moves to Canada to become a homesteader in the wide prairie.
I found the transformation of a man who never had to work at all, and certainly never had to do manual labor to survive, into a farmer to be fascinating. The book did a really wonderful job of making that transition feel believable while never skating over just how monumental a change it was. He eventually makes a claim that's next to a farm settled by a brother and sister, and the slow build between him and the brother is quite lovely, as is the life they establish together. What happens to the three of them during the 1910's isn't exactly unrealistic or too harsh or anything like that, but it still wasn't what I wanted, and it felt like something the author had decided had to happen, rather than the inevitable outcome. I don't feel like the book was better for the tragedy, even if there is a happy ending of sorts for Harry. I wish it had been a bit more of a romance novel, essentially. There are plenty of aspects of Harry's life in the novel as is that defy expectations; I wouldn't have minded one or two additional ones that spared him (and me) some pain.
Grade: B
The story focuses on Harry Cane, an Englishman in the late Nineteenth Century, who marries and has a child and comes from wealth and so doesn't need anything as common as employment. His life just seems to meander along until he meets a man who sees something in him that he didn't quite know himself. They begin sleeping together, and Harry is almost charmingly naive about the entire thing, not really recognizing how dangerous his behavior is until it's discovered and someone tries to blackmail him. He decides to leave the country in order to spare his family the shame, with little protest from his wife, and moves to Canada to become a homesteader in the wide prairie.
I found the transformation of a man who never had to work at all, and certainly never had to do manual labor to survive, into a farmer to be fascinating. The book did a really wonderful job of making that transition feel believable while never skating over just how monumental a change it was. He eventually makes a claim that's next to a farm settled by a brother and sister, and the slow build between him and the brother is quite lovely, as is the life they establish together. What happens to the three of them during the 1910's isn't exactly unrealistic or too harsh or anything like that, but it still wasn't what I wanted, and it felt like something the author had decided had to happen, rather than the inevitable outcome. I don't feel like the book was better for the tragedy, even if there is a happy ending of sorts for Harry. I wish it had been a bit more of a romance novel, essentially. There are plenty of aspects of Harry's life in the novel as is that defy expectations; I wouldn't have minded one or two additional ones that spared him (and me) some pain.
Grade: B
No comments:
Post a Comment