From Publishers Weekly
Growing up gay in Sydney, Australia, on the eve of WW II is the subject of this mannered novel, Elliott's ninth ( Edens Lost ; Waiting for Childhood ), which ranges from tender lyricism to grotesque satire. Son of an aloof mother who idolized his dead hero father, Seaton Daly is orphaned young. Seduced by another schoolboy, Seaton moves from one tremulous, unsuccessful affair to the next. Structurally the novel focuses on a gallery of men for whom Seaton yearns: Byron the narcissistic actor; baby-faced Milly Dick in a pink apron, offering to share his horsey wife; the authoritarian Captain Smollett; the nameless tough who lures gays only to brutalize them. Having created the juvenile radio series Fairyfish , Seaton eventually visits America as a playwright--a phase that the story hastily skims. He is a character fixed at a level of naive sensitivity in a gay world delineated as treacherous and transient. The novel's stronger segments include celebrations of male identity in enclaves like the Marble Bar and Gomorrah, a subway men's room. The explosive denouement seems arbitrary and unheralded.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The life of Seaton Daly, born and orphaned in Australia at the time of World War II, is presented in a series of vignettes that detail his life and loves as a gay man. Except for a spontaneous kiss he gives to a boy at a childhood birthday party and a later pursuit of a heterosexual man, Seaton is a passive observer of life, allowing himself to be used and manipulated by those around him. Readers will have little sympathy for him. Characterization is stong, but the vignettes fail to gel into a comprehensive work, seeming rather to be a framework for the longer, central story of a love triangle in which Seaton loses the man he is pursuing to his best female friend. This story alone makes the book a worthwhile purchase.
-James E. Cook, Dayton & Montgomery Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-James E. Cook, Dayton & Montgomery Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
