Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Vita got a lot of sympathy from me. She's married to a repressed gay man whose most important emotional connection is to his old university friend, their sex life is mostly unsatisfying (unsurprisingly), he's floundering about his future employment, he doesn't especially care for his stepsons. I don't see that she's any more controlling than Magnus, except that she loses to him in the war over Dick. [...]
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So you would have liked Celia Brayfield introduction. I sometimes wonder if I've read the same book.
What is it with the idea that a man having a gay friend must be a repressed gay himself? It's this, if anything, that speaks of some sort of phobia on the part of the author (as opposed to one of her characters) - if we assume this is what she intended the reader to infer when Dick tells us that he and Magnus had been watching a choir-boy. I was inclined to ignore that because Dick's heterosexual preferences seemed otherwise more prevalent through the text.
I had the impression that Dick's relationship with Vita and boys was good
prior to the events of this book. There is an implicit trust and comfort among them in the early stages that speaks of better things in earlier times. Yes, I see Dick floundering when we meet him, but while some of that is the pressure of his choices, it remains unclear how much is the influence of the drug - and Magnus, for that matter. It seems apparent to me that Dick, and his relationship to Vita and boys, has already changed under the influence of all this by the time we start the book, and all we get are small glimpses of what it was like before, for the brief periods when Dick is able to put aside his obsessions/addictions.