The House on Brooke Street [Hardcover]

Neil Bartlett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1997

A gay man named Mr. Page reminisces about his association with a wealthy young man named Mr. Clive, a relationship that takes him from Turkish bath steam rooms to Mayfair dining rooms and releases him from his previous humdrum life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Neil Bartlett's 1990 novel Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall is now a classic of modern gay writing. In that book, Bartlett's intelligence, wit, and imagination dazzled and seduced us. Now, in The House on Brooke Street he has again found ways to startle and surprise us. At first glance it is a love story between two London men that stretches over 30 years, but Brooke Street turns out to also be an examination of how history and sex, secrets and fantasy, merge to form the basis of what we call everyday life. Bartlett is that rare find: a brilliant writer who is interested in the life of the body as well as the mind.

From Publishers Weekly

The author of the headily baroque Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall returns with a similarly overwrought novel played in a minor key. The story here opens in London in 1953, as a department store clerk, Mr. Page, eschewing his usual elaborate, lonely Christmas dinner ("except the drink"), opens his diary to describe his relations, 30 years ago, with the aristocratic Clive B. Vivian. Although Bartlett interpolates historical information into the novel, the dominant voice is Page's, rendered with a sharp ear for irony and pathos. The plot, by contrast, is deliberately murky. As the story unfolds, and the diary entries grow more forthcoming, we learn that the plebeian Page and the aristocratic Vivian are physical doubles, sharing even the same birthday ("You're my long-lost twin," one says to the other); that each is ambivalent about his homosexuality; and that both are infatuated with Vivian's servant, the white-blond Gabriel, who's 19. Bartlett's doppelgangers-and their obsessive and ultimately destructive relationship-seem intended to dramatize the psychic price one pays for living in an oppressive, homophobic society. Yet this novel is populated not with compelling presences but with stereotypes-the decadent aristocrat, the bibulous gay man trapped in the closet, the innocent-seeming blond object of desire with the name of an angel. Even Bartlett's clever linguistic and narrative gamesmanship can't bring these puppets fully to life.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult (January 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525942734
• ISBN-13: 978-0525942733
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #784,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant wrtng.; psychologically real portrait of gay char., August 27, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Corona del Mar, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The House on Brooke Street (Paperback)

Bartlett has made huge literary leaps and bounds since "Ready to Catch Him." "The House on Brooke Street" (called "Mr. Clive & Mr. Page" in the UK) is a psychologically realistic first-person account of a homosexual man in early 20th century London trying to exist with English dignity while fulfilling his "unspeakably" real-human desires.

A compelling psychological profile emerges starting with an obscure (factual) description of a late Victorian home in central London, which Bartlett cleverly weaves into journal entries (Mr. Page has a huge rhetorical palette), recounted dialogue, and a host of pertinent "real-life" historical tidbits. As the narrator uncovers bits of truth about himself, the reader uncovers the truth about the mysterious and often bizarre events of the story. For Bartlett, the truth is evasive and only partially attainable: the facts don't always add up, the narrator's judgements often conflict, the lines between fantasy and reality are constantly blurred, both in our world and in the world of the book.

This book means a lot to me personally because it is one of the first fictional works I've read with a "homosexual theme" that simultaneously avoids gratuitous fantasy and delusion while breaking new ground in terms of form and style. I love it because it is absolutely unlike anything I've ever read: you won't find a character like Mr. Page anywhere. Mr. Page is a real homosexual person, not an archetype. I must say, though, that I wasn't really thinking about politics as I was reading, (and Bartlett probably wasn't concerned with such a simple "message" when he wrote it). Any reader, gay or straight, can understand and feel the emotional (or psychological) "action"; anyone can appreciate Bartlett's often ingenious writing.

Zach Victor

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular achievement!, November 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The House on Brooke Street (Hardcover)

Neil Bartlett achieves the power to hypnotise the reader with this book. If your ideal reading experience is one where the book makes you forget where you are and what time it is,buy this book. It is almost impossible to describe the effect of reading "The House on Brooke Street" (published also under the alternative title "Mr Clive and Mr Page"). The diary extracts of the male protaganist, Mr Page, a lower class shop worker in 1950's London, flicker back and forth between his middle-aged present and his youthful encounter with Mr Clive, an upper class toff, and evoke the loneliness, repression,discrimination and class that almost extinguish Mr Page's humanity. Mr Page's stubborn survival is a triumph, as is this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hidden rooms, August 6, 2001

By 

KIR (Jersey City, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The House on Brooke Street (Paperback)

Rarely in a book does a narrator thoroughly inhabit the prose as does Mr. Page in The House on Brooke Street. The language is sharply written, whimsical and witty at times, chatty but always laced with a bittersweet tinge that ultimately renders this novel profound, sad, and sorrowful. In a way the story of Mr. Page and Mr. Clive, doppelhanger young gay men in 1920s London, is a classic love story- boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy reminisces about boy thirty years later. But to Mr. Page, and because of the brutal harshness of being gay in those eras of British history, it's more than a love story, it's a mystery which he obsessively mines until he is left as hollow and shaken as ever, and even more haunted. The excessive charm of Mr. Page's honesty- about love, fear, and regret- at times hides the severity of the times he speaks of, but not always. The lifespan of a novel's hold on the imagination of the reader is usually its length, but this one is different. For most readers, I think the image of a young man standing naked on the terrace of Brooke Street will remain in their minds as indelibly it does in Mr. Page's memory.