SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE ME AN ICON FOR THIS BOOK
This rereading of the Charioteer has made several things clearer; when the sex happens, the content of Ralph's character & just how smitten with Laurie he is; Laurie's ignorance of other people's interest in him and his overromanticism; Andrew's lack of innocence comapred to how he is perceived, by both Ralph and Laurie. There is the spread of gay scene characters (recognisible shitheads from 2007/8, but in 1941) - I am, or have been, more awake while reading, and everything has more weight and reality. I can see where Laurie is lying to himself, or ignoring the realities that lead people to behave a certain way. Pre-She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named my sympathies lay with Laurie, as the narrator, but now the lie with Ralph, who has had his heart knocked about a bit, had and lost love, and found an older infatuation is 'the real thing', after all.
Though the whole thing is still very sweet in comparison to most of the queer media I've consumed (exceptions for 'But I'm a Cheerleader' and 'Saving Face'; 'From Beginning to End' because incest and also it is barely even a film), I can see the shadows - the cracks and strain of illegality, of war, of the things Laurie observes in the underground queer scene of the time. How you're thrown together with awful people because you're both queer, and it feels like that hasn't changed much. One is expected to be an umbrella and a pillar, and to make nice because one shares an affinity for same-sex love. My sympathies lie with Ralph even in the areas in which I can see myself behaving like Laurie.
At any rate I love the language of the book, wheeling between common, catty dialogue, philosophical heights, and the poetic beauty of the countryside. It slides effortlessly between registers - a rare skill, I think, especially as Mary Renault is by all accounts given to floridityand a tinge of purple. In my mind it is a summer book, and yet most of the action, on re-reading, takes place in the autumn and the onset of winter.
Captured well are the dislocation of being at a party at which one knows no one and is drunk & trapped there waiting on a lift home; the pang of unrequited love; the realisation of a change in emotional landscape; the countryside itself; the ways in which groups form; flirtations both nice and dreadful; the joy in unburdening old fantasies onto the object of them; the jolt with which one realises that one's parents have become old and frail and fallible; pain and how it drains one; and all the minute, finnicky distinctions of class that lie strewn about like landmines in the long grass of English social discourse.