RARA AVIS

A young architect searches for love in Victorian London’s gay demimonde in this debut novel.  

Fleeing scandal in America, 20-year-old architecture student Colin Edwards arrives in London in 1891 and sets his sights on 41-year-old modernist architect Henry Sewell as mentor and conquest. Thanks to “golden-fair skin,” “imperious eyebrows,” “burnished blond hair,” and an arch pickup line, Colin has Henry at “isn’t it ironic that a man of contemporary architecture should have to exit through such archaically monstrous doors?” Henry duly installs Colin in his town house and bed, hires him as an architect, and even legally adopts him as a son with benefits. Henry showcases him at Porter’s, a gentlemen’s club where handsome youths and sugar daddies court one another, featuring bitchy cameos by Oscar Wilde and his lover, Bosie. Colin wants monogamy but accommodates Henry’s preference for orgies. Soon Colin has had sex with nearly every Porter’s habitué and is toasted as “the Prince with the Golden Mouth.” His architecture flourishes as well, culminating in Helios House, a three-story, circular mansion with a glass-roofed central atrium that sounds a bit like a miniature Astrodome but is by all accounts a masterpiece. He stays faithful to Henry but, alas, Henry starts to regard Colin as an “aging, overweight workaholic” with “stupid-looking spectacles.” After Colin turns 29 and incurs a few wrinkles, Henry callously dumps (and fires) him in favor of untethered promiscuity with dewier youths. Much weeping and smashing of objets d’art ensues before the distraught Colin decamps to New York, where he pretty much goes on as before: working as an architect; drinking at “the Carlisle,” Manhattan’s answer to Porter’s; and pursuing relationships with much older men. Swift’s sprawling novel skillfully revels in the atmospherics of upper-crust life in the Gay Nineties: the furtive codes; the dandyism (“Colin’s silk shirt was a creamy white, its sleeves fastened at the end with gold cufflinks studded with diamonds and rubies”); the catty repartée (He: “If you’re going to be a proper seducer, you must never play all of your cards straight away.” He: “I would expect someone your age to be such a fount of wisdom”). But while the dialogue and decor are luxurious and often fun to read, the romantic storytelling feels bloated yet insubstantial. Debauchery is hinted at but not spelled out; most of the book’s 702 pages spool out in Colin and his friends fretting and ruminating drearily about their relationships while sitting in Porter’s, and then rehashing them in endless trans-Atlantic letters. Colin is a male Mary Sue, declared by everyone to be gorgeous, brilliant, and noble, but he’s not a very intriguing character; meanwhile, his youth- and cufflinks-obsessed milieu seems lubricious and callow. (Women rarely appear in the tremulous melodrama, but Colin’s liveliest and most resonant encounters are with them: his mother and sisters, whom he visits after a long estrangement; a smart, spirited, love-struck heiress whom he fends off by feigning tuberculosis but who is the most fully realized character.) Readers may find themselves wishing Colin would get out of his gentlemen’s clubs and live a little.

A richly textured, sometimes-entertaining, but often sluggish and ultimately unconvincing gay romance.