Abandoned at 37%. Too Gothic for me. But quite enjoyed *The Choice* (2023) so will keep on truckin’. ( )

I read this as a third book in a (completely unplanned) trilogy which covered pretty much the history of gay men in London in the ate 20th century. Started with henshawe's "Emperor Waltz", which has as one thread the opening of the Big Gay Bookshop ... one of the characters reads The Swimming Pool Library and because I've never read it but it's a book I believe everyone should read, I did. And I learnt a lot about love and sex and vanity and race ... and then by chance I saw this when I returned Swimming Pool Library I saw this and it looked interesting. It's a fascinating book, sometimes too intense and thoughtful, but very thought provoking, presenting so many of the arguments, positions and stories of gay men in the church, HIV, as well as Jack the Ripper and Eyam. A reviewor a blurb cannot make sense because the tale is complex, but engaging. ( )

The unnamed first-person narrator is an Anglo-Catholic ordinand who has had a nervous breakdown in the middle of Mass and has been sent to a psychiatrist. Each chapter begins with part of his spiel as a tour guide for Jack the Ripper sites in the East End and in the second part of the book for the plague village of Eyam.

The chapters then continue with his monologue addressed to the also unnamed psychiatrist detailing first his refusal to acknowledge his sexual nature and his consequent loss of faith as his sexual needs break through to the surface and then his subsequent re-gaining of his faith as he comes to accept his sexual nature.

First published in 1993 and set in the late 1980s, this book powerfully intertwines themes of religious faith, doubts and reflections; gay sexuality and its expressions; Jack the Ripper and prostitution in the 19th and 20th centuries; the Great Plague of the 1660s and HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and responses to them. A feast for the mind, the soul, and the heart. ( )