Mr Clive & Mr Page
Neil Bartlett
Serpent's Tail pbk, 207 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)
Gay books - or perhaps in these PC-enlightened times, Queer books - are difficult for the modern reader; even the sage Guardian liberal who knows exactly what to boycott down Waitrose. Most people predictably wouldn't like to think about what They get up to in bed (and public toilet and Hampstead Heath) and reading a book about it? Hasn't Salman Rushdie got a new one out? That nice black chap who won the Booker? If this book was about a man and a woman (which, given its measure, to be honest, it could never be) not an eyelid would flutter.
That said, Mr Clive & Mr Page is probably a Gay novel. It's certainly not as unashamedly lustful and, well, brutal as Alan Hollinghurst's outstanding The Folding Star, for one. It takes place almost entirely in 1924, albeit narrated with the hindsight of 33 years, by the eponymous Mr Page; written, after years of brooding, over the four days of a snowbound Christmas break from Selfridges Banking Department.
In 1924 the then 20-year-old Mr Page meet Mr Clive outside the Turkish Baths in Jermyn Street. Immediately he sensed that there was more to their association than met even the trained and studious eye. It wasn't just that they could be mistaken for twins. Nor that they proved to share a birthday. It was more in the fact that the well-to-do Mr Clive insisted on inviting the humble Mr Page to his extraordinary house. It was more in the strange dreams that Mr Page began to have about that house. And about Mr Clive's beautiful, white-haired man servant, Gabriel.
There is no explicit sex in this second novel by the artistic director of Hammersmith's Lyric Theatre. This is a book about secrets and signs, about courtship ritual and Victorian hang-over. Homosexuality wasn't simply frowned upon, remember, it was illegal. In doing what they might, Mr Clive and Mr Page risked more than pointing fingers and ridicule. Notions of social standing and propriety held sway aside from the rigours of the law that so dominate Mr Page's thought as he writes.
It starts with an architect called Richardson who built a house on the South Side of Chicago in 1886, and ends with a newspaper story about the death of Rock Hudson. Between the two are lies and subterfuge and conjecture. It's a gloomy and strange tale that defies the reader to get a handle, shifting between Mr. Page's writings and imaginings, architectural accounts, and that final report from the Daily Mirror. Even by its end, this short, elegant, highly readable novel refuses to let go all its secrets. The cover closes on some still held tight to its narrator; supposition is as much part of its reading as its telling.
In the end it's not Queer, not like Hollinghurst or, say, Oscar Moore's A Matter of Sex and Death. If it resembles anything, it's more the foetid novels of Barbara Vine - especially the dense, cold, rain-lashed No Night Is Too Long - in its hiding of truth and fiction, the ulterior motives of its players, the driving, unstoppable passions that precipitate dark dealings. That Ruth Rendell should be featured amongst those rightfully praising Bartlett on the back cover comes as little surprise.