“London itself is as powerful a presence here as the three gay men whose lives it absorbs.”?The Times Literary Supplement “Vivid and visceral, London Triptych cuts deep to reveal the hidden layers of a secret history.”?Jake Arnott, author of The Long Firm Rent boys, aristocrats, artists, and criminals populate this sweeping novel in which author Jonathan Kemp skillfully interweaves the lives and … interweaves the lives and loves of three very different men in gay London across the decades.
In the 1890s, a young man named Jack apprentices as a rent boy and discovers a life of pleasure and excess that leads to new friendships, most notably with the soon-to-be-infamous Oscar Wilde. A century later in 1998, David tells his own tale of unashamed decadence from prison, recalling life as a young man arriving in the city in the mid-’80s just as the scourge of AIDS hit. Where their paths cross, in the politically sensitive 1950s, when gay men were the target of police and politicians alike, the artist Colin tentatively explores his sexuality while working on his painting “London Triptych.”
Moodily atmospheric and rich with history, London Triptych is a sexy, resplendent portrait of the politics and pleasures of queer life in one of the world’s most fascinating cities.
Jonathan Kemp lives in London, where he currently teaches creative writing at Birkbeck College. London Triptych, his first novel, was published in the United Kingdom in 2010 and won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award.
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This was one of my ‘to read’ books and when I found it prominently placed in a Vancouver book store, I picked it up straight away. I’m so glad I did.
Three tales are told in first person from three very different broken gay men. One lives in the latter part of the nineteenth century, another tells his life from the 1950’s and the last from the final decades of the twentieth century. All live in London. All we can identify with.
To say any more would spoil the wonderful journey I took with each of these characters. Each one is victim to unrequited love and each in a very different way. We identify. And each story, as we go back and forth to a different time in each chapter, travels at the same pace, each reflecting similar highs and lows the others are feeling.
Leading up to reading this book I read another fictional autobiography which felt like a random telling of events that didn’t lead to an overall story arc. Several times I was frustrated with it and planned to ditch it but I carried on to find the main character suddenly finds love – out of nowhere, and we’re expected to believe it. London Triptych does not suffer from any story structure flaws like this. These are all honest accounts of heartbreak, but this is not a bleak book.
It celebrates who we are and how far we’ve come, and all of us gay men have made some, if not all, of the mistakes Jack, Colin and David do.
Simply beautiful.
A very clever idea. A novel set in three different time periods, highlighting the evolving attitudes to homosexuality. A real page turner.
Jonathan Kemp explores hungers we cannot explain and paints images not only intensely erotic, but tender. Here, in London Triptych, he shows us the unfolding of three men’s lives, each an unravelling ribbon, fluid, twisting, looking back upon itself. Their stories are confessionals, inviting us to enter the nocturnal, hidden recesses of the psyche. Meanwhile, London’s shadows and secrets echo those within our protagonists, and remind us that we readers, too, have our untold stories.
Each of the tales within the ‘triptych’ takes place, primarily, in London, though separated by five decades. We see the details of the setting change, while the themes remain eternal: our desire for what we cannot articulate; our struggle to express ourselves freely; our eagerness to navigate the ‘geography of possibilities’; our delight in love, glorious, overwhelming and unexpected; and the vulnerability of that state.
1890s rent boy Jack Rose falls into an almost unwilling passion for Oscar Wilde, leading towards a path of disappointment and betrayal. 1950s artist Colin tentatively explores his sexuality, against a backdrop of prudery and prejudice. In the 1990s, David awaits release from prison, telling of the lover who deceived him.
With each interchanging narrative, we learn more of each protagonist’s history and motivations, and we see the ways in which their stories resemble one other. They do not go in search of love. Rather, it surprises them, catching them off guard. They experience transcendence and then misery: a change in their worldview.
Sex is central to the story, an enduring, irresistible force, with or without love. It is the engine driving each of our narrators to discover a version of the ‘self’ yet out of reach.
Jack Rose tells us: ‘I became a whore in order, not to find myself, but to lose myself in the dense forest of that name.’
However, love is the transformative emotion. Love enervates and destroys, bringing ultimate joy and torture. We are shown its ability to shed light on our restricted, repetitive paths.
Kemp explores what it has meant to be homosexual in a world which views those desires as dangerously inverted, and shows us the tension between pleasure and danger, when there are ‘no laws but those of the body’:
Kemp’s storytelling goes beyond action and consequence, or the clever use of dialogue to reveal character, or the exploration of eternal themes. His talent lies in his use of language, probing words for their secrets, for their ‘blood-beat’, for their ability to reveal ‘meaning held within the contours of the skin’. He returns, again and again, to the inadequacy of language to express the erotic truths of the body, the ‘cannibal, animal hunger’ of desire.
Meanwhile, London itself embodies the elusive, enchanting paradox of existence. It is a place of anonymity, and simultaneous intimacy; London is the unseen, legion-faced (and thus faceless) listener, inviting the narrators to share their secrets. It is a place of judgment (all three stories bring to bear the presence of the law and prospective punishment for homosexual transgression) and of liberation. It is a place of contradictions, just as we are contradictory.