| A Review of: What's 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 gong out
for a late supper. The older man tells the younger his life story,
his childhood in a repressed home with a silent, brooding clergyman
father, 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 very wealthy man. Peter travels from
Canada to England to visit Martin many times over the years, and
it in 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 Shelly, when a student at Oxford, grabbing a baby
from its mother's arms and demanding that the child, too young to
speak, tell everything he could remember of the life of the soul,
is returned to often, 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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