The Liar, by Stephen Fry

Excerpt
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

A Brief Summary
The Liar follows Adrian Healey, the eponymous liar, from his days in the 1970s as a dandy-ish British public schoolboy with a 'pash' for sporty classmate Hugo Cartwright, through his Cambridge days in the '80s, where he meets eccentric philologist Professor Trefusis and gets drawn into an international web of intrigue.

My Thoughts
It is entirely likely that Stephen Fry could write a tract on the validity of Star Wars as a defense plan or a sequel to Twilight and I would gleefully demand to read it (on second thought, who wouldn't want to read the latter), but this novel is every bit as bitingly funny and enjoyably dirty (have you ever wanted to read Dicken's long-lost turn towards Victorian homoerotica?) as one would expect from him.

Adrian is a marvelous character, never quite as sophisticated as he'd like to be nor really as terrible as he sporadically self-loathingly considers himself -- he felt very young, to me, which might be part of the reason that no matter how hard I tried to tamp my earnest side down I did feel pangs of sympathy and actual emotion for him. [Full disclosure: fourteen-year-old Emma wanted to be Adrian. Also, a vampire. It was a sad time.] Also, living up to his title, Adrian is the epitome of the unreliable narrator, which creates an enjoyably twisty narrative that ties up rather surprisingly.

Overall, I truly enjoyed this book, and it has given me one more Stephen Fry-thing to go around citing obnoxiously. By the way, did you know that Queen Victoria introduced hemophilia into the royal houses of Europe, and that to have done so she must have either been the result of a freak genetic mutation or -- gasp -- been an illegitimate child? QI did.

The Gay
Oh, where to begin. This is the book that confirms everything I have ever secretly, deep-down, and dearly believed about British boys' schools. You will never look at the term "daisy chain" the same again.

Our hero is, of course, mind-bogglingly in love with another boy at the start of the book, and is at fifteen already a fair connoisseur of sodomy, but his Wildean tendencies do not mark the limits of the book's interest in sexuality. There is the matter of Adrian's flirtations with bisexuality, the issue of the aforementioned Dickensian tome and its questionable incestuous content, an incident of alleged cottaging, a detailed history of the life of a 1970s rentboy. It's irreverant and outrageous, but also, in some ways, refreshingly frank.

And, really, if you secretly wished you had a cape and cane and that you spoke in withering bon mots when you were fourteen, there is much to appeal to you.

Star Ratings
Overall: ★★★ 1/2
Queer Content: ★★★★