FAIRYLAND

by Sumner Locke Elliott ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 1990

There is something touchingly old-fashioned about this Australian-born writer's latest novel. While the hero is gay, and the sex (though the setting is pre-AIDS) forthrightly described, somehow it's more the story of a naive and guileless soul, searching for love and romance in a tough, cynical world rather than any celebration or delineation of gayness. Seaton, the son of an Australian war hero and a woman who wrote a famous patriotic song, is brought up by saintly and incredibly naive Essie (one is reminded of some of Dickens' impossibly good working-class women). Essie works as a maid to support them, and when Seaton leaves school at 16, Australia is in the midst of the Great Depression. He finds a number of small, ill-paying jobs but begins to advance when he joins an advertising agency. From there on, he moves steadily upward--first into writing scripts for the radio, and then, after WW II, when he emigrates to the US, writing for TV and the theater. By the time he is middle-aged, he's a success, but not at love. Never really questioning or worrying about his gayness, he has had since adolescence a number of sexual encounters, as well as crushes on men who turned out either to be heterosexual or unwilling to commit themselves. Seaton really is the nicest and most decent of young men, liked by all who know him, but he is the inveterate naif, used by far too many, and only finding this out when it's too late. A surprise meeting in New York with an old friend, Gin, from Australia, who introduces him to her long-hidden and extremely handsome son, suggests that at last his search is over. But again poor Seaton is let down, this time finally. His murder by a deranged Gin seems as arbitrary is the demise of those Victorian heroines who used to exit equally abruptly following the sudden onset of galloping consumption. The plot moves at an agreeable, if sometimes too accelerated, pace, and life in Australia between the wars is vividly evoked, though Elliott is far too generous with adjectives--nothing is left unmodified or unqualified. A diverting but not engrossing story.

Pub Date: March 7, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION