Almost History

Christopher Bram is among the most intelligent novelists working today, and this is his most ambitious attempt so far at taking the gay novel out beyond the ghetto. It includes a clear-eyed indictment of American foreign policy, that addresses - and by inference links - the horrors of American militarism in Vietnam and the more insidious but no less vicious diplomatic support for the Marcos regime in the Phillipines.The central figure, Jim Goodall, is a Washington career diplomat at once homosexual but only 'almost' gay. In the course of the novel he travels from detachment to muted acceptance of his sexuality, and from detatchment to confrontation with the war machine that employs him. Unlike the attractive gay heroes in some of Bram's novels - Hank, in 'Hold Tight', for example - Goodall is not particularly appealing. But unlike Bram's better-known bystander, the James Whale figure in his 'Father of Frankenstein', Goodall is living at points where history truly is happening, and there are no sidelines. His urgent question is whether gayness and diplomat status do keep him only 'almost' complicit with the gung-ho male-bonding military that he's actively on side with - and the answer is (almost) 'no'. So it's not a simple book with a positive-image hero, but something braver. Like a lot of great big bold novels - from 'Middlemarch' to 'Lolita' - it takes the risk of centring on a protagonist who is never fully likeable. There are parallels for this too in distinguished gay writing, and I found myself recalling Angus Wilson's wonderful 'As if By Magic', which also surveys the disasterousness of first-world intervention in third-world countries - and does so through the eyes of a man coming to terms with gay sexuality while bonded more with a girl from a younger generation of his own family than with any of the men who happen to share his bed.Bram's fearlessness is especially apparent in several extraordinary scenes that feature Imelda Marcos as a high-camp Dickensian monster. These are black comedy encounters testing out how far camp excess is tolerable when crisis is extreme. It's in the end a novel about responsibility, asking what happens people who have been written out of history - as for so long gay people have been - once they find themselves assimilated through turning-point events. Resolution is only on the level of the personal and the intimate, and the ending makes plain the dissatisfactions which thereby persist. In short, it's a story of personal revolution achieved in lives that stay tied to a culture that blocks off change and betterment on any broader level.Among the great pleasures of this novel are its unfaltering commitment to awareness, always evident in the quality of its writing, which is never less than fluently elegant, and which again and again manages moments of lucidity and illumination that reach out towards a better state than the characters can achieve. Hence for me its re-reada

Having interned at the State Department and knowing a bit about the Foreign Service, I find this book to be generally accurate, though at times stretching things a little. But I understand this is all done for the sake of a good fiction. And this is good fiction, thoroughly engaging and very vivid in its depictions of characters, places, and events. Even though the main character is gay, the themes challenge the minds of everyone.

This book is among the finest from one of the most interesting writers currently struggling to break out the straightjacket (pun intended) of "gay fiction." Though its author and protagonist are gay men, and a late-in-life "coming out" is among the themes, this is first of all a political epic that anyone can enjoy, set in a recent past that most of us watched on television. Straight friends -- even some who aren't used to gay people, and who would never read "gay fiction" -- have found this book compelling for its core story of a diplomat whose career (driven in part by a denied sexuality) propels him to the edge of great moments of history -- from the Vietnam war through the Philippine revolution -- but who never leaves his mark on history itself. A great read.