| A Review of: WhatÆs Remembered by W.P.KinsellaWhat's Remembered is graced with a beautiful cover designed by
Tannis Goddard. More a fictional memoir than a novel, the story
opens with two gay men meeting at a gallery opening and going out
for a late supper. The older man tells the younger one his life
story, describing his childhood in a repressed home with a silent,
brooding clergyman father, and his falling in love with a man who
does not return his affection while at Oxford. Peter, probably no
pun intended, teaches at a second-rate Canadian university where
he is seduced by a student and they have a wild, necessarily secret
affair, until the student, Martin, graduates and goes off to conquer
the world. This affair takes place before the Canadian Government
decided it had no place in the bedrooms of the nation. But even
after homosexuality is no longer a crime, the characters for the
most part, live loveless, promiscuous lives filled with guilt.
Martin ends up in England where he begins living with a very wealthy
man. Peter travels from Canada to England to visit Martin many times
over the years, and it is with these visits that the novel bogs
down in the middle pages. Martin and his friends, although they
have everything money can buy, do not lead happy lives. They drink
excessively and attend legions of boring parties. There are academic
overtones as the story of the poet, Shelley, when a student at
Oxford, is returned to often. Shelley had grabbed a baby from its
mother's arms and demanded that the child, too young to speak, tell
everything he could remember of the life of the soul. But just what
this has to do with the characters in the novel is never very clear.
Martin eventually drinks himself to death and Peter returns to
Canada, where he reveals a heartbreaking teenage experience to his
prospective lover. There is hope that a real relationship will
develop, in the era just before the AIDS epidemic. The writing is
elegant and Peter is a sympathetic character.
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