From Publishers Weekly
The author of The Lost Language of Cranes offers a departure in both format (the narrative is told in flashback) and setting (the milieu is Spain and Europe) in his latest novel, a haunting reminiscence with faint echoes of E. M. Forster's Maurice . As in that earlier gay-themed story, a young man from Britain's upper class falls in love with a youth beneath his station. Events here, however, are exacerbated by world events: the roiling background of the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37 as recalled in 1978 by Brian Botsford, a novelist and erstwhile lover of Edward Phelan, a ticket-taker in the London underground. The young Brian, wary of his homosexuality at a time when the word was scarcely spoken, shares his digs with 20-year-old Edward but engages in a desultory heterosexual affair as well. Edward discovers the liaison and flees England to join the Loyalists in Spain. Brian's realization of what he has lost leads to the book's most wrenching segment: his arduous attempts to secure the release of his friend, who has been jailed after trying to desert. Leavitt captures his protagonists' youthful ardor--both amatory and political--with an understated style that carries the reader as the story builds in intensity. The air of doomed romance permeates but never overwhelms the book; this is a finely crafted melodrama in the best sense of the word. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Best known for
The Lost Language of Cranes (1988), recently adapted into a BBC TV movie, Leavitt is one of the most gifted writers of gay fiction. The prose of both
Cranes and his new novel is positively lyrical.
While England Sleeps is a historical romance in the purest sense. The narrator, Brian Botsford, is a member of England's upper class, an ambitious writer who happens to be homosexual (not gay in the contemporary sense, not least because he initially suspects he will "outgrow" the inclination). He falls in love with Edward Phelan, who is definitely not from the upper class; in fact, he works on the underground and still lives with his family. Edward moves in with Brian, and all's well until social mores and the effects of repression intrude on their happiness. After the relationship deteriorates, Edward, who has Communist leanings, goes off to fight Fascists in the Spanish civil war. Brian's race to rescue him leads to the book's climax. Brian tells this story from his old age in a tone that evokes a feeling akin to a pentimento: his life has been altered by an all too quickly fading memory of love. The novel's action is compelling, its language beautiful. Its story lingers as movingly in the reader's memory as in its narrator's
Charles Harmon
