GatesyRead

I picked up a second-hand copy of A Single Man in a bookshop in the Blue Mountains. I had wanted to read Christopher Isherwood since quoting from Goodbye to Berlin in my own novel, The Copyart Murders. What I found in this novel surprised me on a number of different levels. First, there was the frankness of the depiction of a gay man who has just lost his partner, Jim – we find out how later in the novel. This is 1964, and I thought about how the issue of gay marriage, topical as it is, is not new in the sense of couples like George and Jim having lived together in all-but-wedlock for years now. The description of the suburban life they have been living, with George’s silence to his neighbours about the true reason for his ‘room-mate’s’ absence is poignant, yet saved from sentimentality by the irony of George’s natural outlook on life. This leads to the second surprise in the novel – the moments of real human insight, hopeful and profound in nature. In this respect, I should have ex