book question
Have any of you read Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance (UK title Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders)?
Somebody recced this to me, and I gave it a try because, well, it has Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in it, and together, they fight crime! But I got about fifty pages in and was appalled by the weird coverup of Wilde's homosexuality--there's a reference to him having sex with a (female) French prostitute, and lots of stuff about how much he loves his wife, and insistence that his relationship with a teenage rent boy is perfectly brotherly and platonic.
At this point I began to skim ahead, and discovered that the murderer is gay, and kills because he's gay, and that male-male desire and sexual acts are presented throughout the book as sinister and perverse. Our main character, the guy we're supposed to identify with, refers to male/male sex as "the act of darkness."
I'm kind of stunned that a novel so glaringly homophobic, especially a novel about Oscar Wilde that's so glaringly homophobic, would not only be published but would receive widespread rave reviews.
So . . . thoughts? Am I misreading? Is the second book in the series any better? Or is it just that we haven't really advanced much beyond the mindset of 1950s pulp novels about deviants and their sad, violent, twilight world?
*****
Somebody recced this to me, and I gave it a try because, well, it has Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in it, and together, they fight crime! But I got about fifty pages in and was appalled by the weird coverup of Wilde's homosexuality--there's a reference to him having sex with a (female) French prostitute, and lots of stuff about how much he loves his wife, and insistence that his relationship with a teenage rent boy is perfectly brotherly and platonic.
At this point I began to skim ahead, and discovered that the murderer is gay, and kills because he's gay, and that male-male desire and sexual acts are presented throughout the book as sinister and perverse. Our main character, the guy we're supposed to identify with, refers to male/male sex as "the act of darkness."
I'm kind of stunned that a novel so glaringly homophobic, especially a novel about Oscar Wilde that's so glaringly homophobic, would not only be published but would receive widespread rave reviews.
So . . . thoughts? Am I misreading? Is the second book in the series any better? Or is it just that we haven't really advanced much beyond the mindset of 1950s pulp novels about deviants and their sad, violent, twilight world?
*****