Book Review: The Charioteer

[osprey_archer]

The moment you have all been waiting for has arrived! I have finished The Charioteer! And I have MANY SPOILERY THOUGHTS, which I will put behind

I had mixed feelings about many of the characters & pairings, but I'm going to start with the one pairing I did NOT have mixed feelings about, which is Alec/Sandy, I had very strong feelings of "Alec deserves a boyfriend who does not attempt suicide every time Alec talks a bit too long with another boy at a party."

Or in fact, Alec could just dump Sandy without lining up another boyfriend first. Being alone is better than being with someone so jealous that they slit their wrists in the bathroom every time you talk to someone else.

As for the main romantic trifecta of Andrew & Laurie & Ralph, however, I was very torn. I found Andrew more appealing: he's serious and gentle and very kind to Laurie, and there's a tremendous romantic appeal about Andrew & Laurie talking in the forest - a sort of timelessness to it, like they're in a lovely bubble that's drifted away from the world and the war. (Although the war is very much on Andrew's mind, in particular: he's a Quaker who is torn about whether he ought to remain a conscientious objector.)

However, I did also get the strong sense that at least at the moment, this is really the only way their relationship works. When Andrew realizes that his feelings for Laurie have a sexual component, his immediate response is to run away to London, and not just for a day or two, but to get himself permanently transferred there on the theory that he had better just not see Laurie again ever, or at least until he's gotten over him.

Of course Andrew might get over this eventually: he's young, and the world is wide. But he's clearly not boyfriend material right at this moment, and just as clearly Laurie (although he would probably rather die than admit this directly) really wants a boyfriend right now, and whatever else you might say about Ralph Lanyon he is THERE and READY.

There's actually a moment when Laurie complains to himself that Ralph doesn't see Laurie's relationship with Andrew as real because there's no physical component, and I think this is true, but I think this is also to a certain extent true of Laurie himself: if he and Andrew had been making out in the forest, I don't think Laurie would have fallen into Ralph's arms the way he did.

Or maybe it's not so much that Laurie doesn't think it's real as it doesn't fully fulfill his needs, although he wants it to? I think Laurie projects onto Andrew an ideal of sexless love that he finds beautiful and romantic and simpler than dealing with the messiness of physical attraction; Laurie has accepted his homosexuality, more or less, but he's still sort of looking for an escape hatch.

(Also, side note: good God Laurie, put poor Nurse Adrian out of your mind, you know very well you don't love that girl and it would be terribly unkind to take advantage of her crush. I thought he was over it but then there's the point where he thinks he's lost both Andrew and Ralph and he's like, oh, well, I could write to Nurse Adrian and string her along... LAURIE. NO.)

But although Laurie finds this platonic ideal compelling, and wants to find that love perfectly fulfilling, in actual fact he doesn't: thus the fact that he falls into Ralph Lanyon's arms more or less the moment that Ralph spreads them wide. He doesn't love Ralph the way he loves Andrew, but also maybe loving someone as a shining ideal is not the best way to love your romantic partner. The higher the pedestal, the harder the crash.

Actually, Laurie idealizes Ralph, too, but the pedestal is not as high, the ideal is not one of purity, and Ralph is aware of this and a willing participant in it (whereas Andrew seems to be totally oblivious to the fact that Laurie has enshrined him as an ideal of Goodness and Purity). He likes being seen as the omnicompetent lordly prefect who takes care of everything. Laurie's feelings about being the taken-care-of are more mixed, but at the same time, he is not merely putting it up with it, he connives toward it, while only half-admitting to himself that's what he's doing.

Possibly he does just like to be taken care of, but he thinks he shouldn't; or he likes being taken care of, but he doesn't like the fact that Ralph can be so officious about it, like the time that Ralph arranges for Laurie to transfer hospitals without even asking Laurie about it. (There's a bit where Alec, who is Ralph's ex, comments that Ralph "takes too much on himself," and that's really true and key to Ralph's character.)

The officiousness sometimes made me want to kick Ralph: there are times when he appears to be trying to win Laurie through the sheer force of superior organization. He also tells Laurie they'll get a flat together, as if the fact that they slept together once makes this a done thing, without actually asking if Laurie wants to get a flat with him. However, unlike Andrew, he is actually available right now, and he adores Laurie. Laurie is so hungry to love and be loved, of course he finds that hard to resist.

The book ends with Andrew in London, having run away from Laurie/his feelings, and Laurie committing himself to Ralph after stumbling upon Ralph's suicide note (which he was not supposed to see until Ralph was safely dead). I found this... I was going to say unsatisfying, but I think frustrating is probably the better word; in a way it is satisfying. We can see in Laurie's relationship with Andrew that he's got a strong protective streak - part of what he likes about Andrew is that he feels he is protecting him - and in a sense this realization that Ralph is hurt and vulnerable allows Laurie to bring this quality to that relationship, where hitherto the protectiveness has all flowed the other way, from Ralph to Laurie.

But it is also a little unsatisfying, because the extremity of the situation rather forces Laurie's hand: he's not so much making a choice as deciding to enthusiastically embrace a choice that he can't help making. And I do wonder if Ralph is going realize Laurie read that note, and feel that Laurie is with him largely out of pity.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

To be honest, my reading of The Charioteer was massively influenced by the fact I was barely out of my teens and not in the.... healthiest.... headspace, and the short version is that I identified with Laurie, a lot. I'd be interested to re-read it and see how my perception is different now.

Alec is the best and deserves the world, or at least a better boyfriend. (I did feel sorry for Sandy, to be honest. He clearly needed help he probably won't get on account of it being the 1940s.)

[kore]

Laurie is a great POV character! He's very engaging, kind of honest and open and sweet. He does remind me a fair amount of Maurice, except Forster deliberately wrote Maurice as pretty thick.

[troisoiseaux]

He does remind me a fair amount of Maurice, except Forster deliberately wrote Maurice as pretty thick.

I have to confess, I've never actually read (or seen) Maurice! I love A Room With A View, but I've never read anything else by Forster.

[sovay]

(I did feel sorry for Sandy, to be honest. He clearly needed help he probably won't get on account of it being the 1940s.)

Sandy and Bunny are both characters where I think I feel much more kindly toward them than the author intended me to, but, tough: the author is literally dead and I don't have to believe that people can only stay stuck in their destructive patterns for the rest of their lives.

[troisoiseaux]

I read a lovely fic at one point where Sandy ended up working as a doctor on the North African front and met Andrew, who was an ambulance driver there. I wish I could remember who wrote it or anything else about the plot, but there was Character Growth on both their parts.

[osprey_archer]

I can definitely see this being a book that would change over the course of a lifetime as one read it, yeah. There's a lot going on in it!

I did feel bad for Sandy, but very much in a "This behavior is on its way to destroying Alec and that destruction would probably only make Sandy's self-destructive habits worse, so Alec should GTFO" kind of way. Sandy clearly needs psychological help and a more accepting social climate, neither of which were really available to him in the 1940s.

[kore]

whatever else you might say about Ralph Lanyon he is THERE and READY

//cackles

It's been a while since I reread the whole book, rather than just favourite bits, but I do think Renault is riffing on the themes of so-called Platonic love with Laurie and Andrew and it's really important that Ralph and Laurie can be physically together and out to each other. But then again Renault also loves bittersweet endings and angst even in her OTP portrayals, so I think you're right that Laurie also really loses something with Andrew and what he has with Ralph is somewhat compromised and troubled.

I felt like everyone else was very well-drawn but I couldn't get a handle on Andrew at all. He seems either absolutely naive or really deliberately ignoring every possible signal from Laurie, or maybe both. I'm not sure whether that's Renault being Renault or if I'm not understanding a certain kind of would-be-closeted-if-he-thought-about-it psychology in that time period. It's kind of an interesting twist on the not-quite triangle in Maurice, although in that book Maurice and Clive do get physical. Is Andrew rabbiting off because he's repulsed, or doesn't know his own sexuality yet, or he's attracted to Laurie? I can't tell. He's just sort of opaque for me.

OTOH I kind of fucking love Ralph and the first time I read the book and realized Laurie JUST BARELY saves him from topping himself I think I actually gasped. Renault does love the angst so I think it's perfectly possible Ralph could realize Laurie read the note and think Laurie stayed out of pity, but no Laurie really does love him! but they don't communicate about it until they're old and grey and full of sleep, or something.

[troisoiseaux]

Reading everyone's comments on the past couple of Charioteer posts has been fascinating in terms of how everyone feels differently about the same characters? Like, "no two people read the same book the same way" is objectively obvious, but like, subjectively super interesting to see it actually play out.

[kore]

Oh yes, and I also think it really depends on when someone first read the book and their own experiences -- which like you say is true of any literary interpretation, but this book tends to strike a really personal chord with its readers, I think.

[sovay]

Renault does love the angst so I think it's perfectly possible Ralph could realize Laurie read the note and think Laurie stayed out of pity, but no Laurie really does love him! but they don't communicate about it until they're old and grey and full of sleep, or something.

Renault loves the angst so hard that she totally broke the ending of her first novel to make it come out unhappily, but while I understood after a few re-reads (I read it for the first time when I was thirteen or fourteen, right after The King Must Die and The Last of the Wine) that we are intended to view Laurie as kind of settling for Ralph, I have still never been able to imagine how a relationship with Andrew would actually work, whereas I think that Laurie and Ralph have a decent shot at happiness rather than merely being used to one another, especially if they learn to have conversations, which Renault's characters can generally only do about the wrong thing.

[troisoiseaux]

Renault loves the angst so hard that she totally broke the ending of her first novel to make it come out unhappily

My first thought was that this referred to The Friendly Young Ladies, so apparently this is something she did more than once??

[kore]

we are intended to view Laurie as kind of settling for Ralph, I have still never been able to imagine how a relationship with Andrew would actually work, whereas I think that Laurie and Ralph have a decent shot at happiness

YES, absolutely. Laurie and Andrew are so chaste and sub-sub-text and idealized, to me it just doesn't seem like any basis for a real relationship, and while Ralph certainly has flaws, he and Laurie at least are on the same plane, sort of -- they can connect physically, but in other ways too. Laurie/Andrew is probably the doomed ideal, though, knowing Renault.

[ancientreader]

A thing about the relationship between Ralph and Laurie is that Laurie does desire Ralph sexually. Renault is so oblique, it's blink-and-you'll-miss-it, but at the wedding reception, she drops in that Laurie is always aware of where Ralph is in the room, which is such a tell of erotic attraction. And that first time they have sex, after Laurie's mother's wedding, she has Laurie acknowledge that he's gotten something he's "long been desiring." I had to look that up!

So, anyway, I agree that I think R & L have a good shot, whereas L & A would be hopeless, Laurie would constantly be running into his own investment in Andrew's purity. Ralph is overbearing, but he's also generous, and Laurie does genuinely need some caretaking for the foreseeable future, given the pain his injury causes him and the ways it limits his mobility.

I confess to some impatience with Andrew -- with him and Dave, with all that fucking uprightness and frostily "we must not judge we must just not actually express love and affection physically" attitude. Renault obviously takes the position that sexual love is a comedown, and to hell with that.

[osprey_archer]

My impression was that in terms of absolute liking, Laurie likes Andrew more than Ralph, and has fewer reservations about him (like his mixed feelings about Ralph's officiousness: he finds it annoying, but also weirdly likes it, but kind of doesn't like that he likes it?). But at the end of the day if you want to have a relationship then you have to have a relationship with a person who is available for that, and Ralph is and Andrew isn't and that's that.

So in a sense he's settling, but then again "I'm just going to pine after Andrew forever but never tell him because he is a perfect baby angel who must Never Know" is, in a different way, settling.

Also, even if Laurie is settling at first, I feel like he's the kind of person who might very well fall more in love over the course of a relationship? He has such a longing for affection and you know Ralph is just going to pour that over him. Even if the suicide note forced his hand in the moment, over the long term Laurie might come to be glad of it. To think that he might never have let Ralph love him if it weren't for that, etc.

What I got out of the Andrew bits (particularly his final letter) is that he's attracted to Laurie, but he doesn't realize it until near the end of the book - that is, he knows he likes Laurie a lot, but he doesn't until Bunny more or less forces his hand put a name to what kind of liking it is or what that means.

[kore]

I think a lot of that makes sense, particularly Laurie falling in love more with Ralph as time goes on, because he does seem like that kind of person. -- I think part of my resistance to Laurie/Andrew is I really don't like pining stories, come to think of it!

[sovay]

I had very strong feelings of "Alec deserves a boyfriend who does not attempt suicide every time Alec talks a bit too long with another boy at a party."

I love Alec. He is my favorite character in the book and just about the only character I don't want to smack upside the head at one point or another for their attitude toward their sexuality. Renault, of course, had difficulty with the concept of gay liberation/pride, but I'd still be shocked if Alec didn't end up an activist: "I'm not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality . . . Criminals are blackmailed. I'm not a criminal. I'm prepared to go to some degree of trouble, if necessary, to make that point."

[aurumcalendula]

This!

[osprey_archer]

I'm just imagining Ralph and Laurie (whether they are together or apart at this point, I feel sure they were be united in their reaction to this) shuddering in horror at the way that Alec runs around being so OPEN and OUT THERE.

If Andrew ever does come to terms with his queerness I could actually see him going much the same route (if he can handle being a conchie in World War II, he'll probably be able to handle the difficulties of early gay activism, too)... but I could also see him just not coming to terms with it.

[aurumcalendula]

I need to reread this again to see how it strikes me now - I remember there being parts I absolutely loved, but the sense of 'we're not like those queer people' from her protagonists kinda grated on me.

[sovay]

but the sense of 'we're not like those queer people' from her protagonists kinda grated on me.

It was still grating the last time I checked on it, but did not prevent me from re-reading the novel. It's partly a Renault special and partly, I am beginning to think, a mid-century queer special—I understand the importance of asserting that not every queer person looks like the stereotype, but it falls over fast into respectability politics.

[osprey_archer]

Seconding sovay that this "we're not like THOSE queer people" thing seems to show up a lot in mid-century queer novels. Even in Brideshead Revisited, which doesn't fully commit to its queerness, has this contrast between Sebastian and Anthony Blanche, the strong sense that Sebastian may be fey but at least he's not like THAT.

[littlerhymes]

OK YES the suicide note, I remember some of my vague feelings about the ending now haha. I definitely felt that pessimism of Laurie's hand being forced, it's almost not a choice - and it's in it's the way it's written too, she closes the book so sharply that I only really got closure after sitting with the ending for a while (was that your intention all along Mary).

But at the end of it all, I was quite optimistic about it! Andrew is not ready and might never be ready and maybe Laurie might like him a bit better as an idea than a person. Whereas Ralph is, as you say, right there. Their relationship might be more prosaic and it's not a perfect meeting of minds but I really like the idea of them trying to make it work.

In conclusion, Alec Get A Better BoyFriend 2020.

[osprey_archer]

I definitely felt that she's leaning on the pessimism at the end. You definitely could write that scene as Laurie realizing how deep his feelings for Ralph actually run, but instead Renault focuses more on his compassion/pity for Ralph, which are so intense in that moment that they are almost like love. But maybe not... exactly like love?? Maybe not the best basis for a long-term relationship.

But definitely Ralph is infinitely more available in the short term than Andrew is. Andrew clearly is Not Ready, and may NEVER be ready, whereas Ralph probably showed up with the words DOWN TO FUCK tattooed on his forehead.

...However, the secret hope of my heart is that Alec and Laurie will one day get together, I feel that Alec could provide the caretaking Laurie wants without being as overbearing as Ralph, and Laurie of course would be a MUCH calmer and more supportive boyfriend than Sandy. Plus, Alec seemed to like him at the party when they had that chat together!

[asakiyume]

but also maybe loving someone as a shining ideal is not the best way to love your romantic partner --Very strong agree on that one.

[osprey_archer]

It's just setting everyone up for disappointment. The ideal will inevitably come crashing down and the idealized person will be left aghast, all, "I thought you loved me as a human being, not a symbol of your own lost innocence??"