Book review: Impressive debut explores forbidden lust and love in Victorian-era England

Tom Crewe’s impressive first novel set in London in the 1890s explores the possibility of unconventional relationships between men and women, based on sexual freedom. This is the ‘New Life’ of the title, a dangerous prospect, when sodomy was still a crime punishable by penal servitude.

It opens with an explicit four-page-long description of a middle-aged man in a crush of bodies on a rush hour London tube train being sexually aroused by the presence of the man he is pressed up against. 

His fellow passenger seems to share his furtive and terrible excitement, and the reader is riveted by the powerful description of their secret pleasure, while fearful of where it might lead...

The man in the London underground is John Addington, a wealthy scholar who has just completed a book in which he attempts to reconcile the ancient Greek’s homosexual acts with their sublime drama and philosophy. Addington is a married man with grown up daughters, and a wife, Catherine, who is aware of his homosexuality, and his struggle to maintain a façade of respectability. Her patience with his sexual obsessions is wearing thin and she is deeply unhappy.

Henry Ellis, the other main character, is younger and qualified as a doctor but makes a living as a writer for liberal journals, read by people with “advanced” opinions. He is interested in freeing his contemporaries from the shackles of polite society, not because he is a homosexual but because he is an idealist. He suffers from extreme shyness, but has been befriended by Edith, an accomplished fellow-writer, embarking on a career as a lecturer.

Together they decide to seek the “New Life”, one in which sex “should be viewed clearly, stripped of every petty, dingy accrual of secrecy, laid out cleanly as a healthy human impulse”.

They intend to get married, but to live apart. The marriage is described as “a prototype for changed relations between men and women, uncorrupted by sexual expectation”. As Henry says, we must live in the future that we hope to make.

The parallel stories of John and Henry are told in separate chapters, steeped in the atmosphere of London in the 1890s, and rich in the social nuances of the time.

John acquires a boyfriend, Frank, a handsome working class compositor, and moves him into his house as his “secretary”, to his wife’s fury. 

They kiss publicly, hidden from view by a pea-souper fog. Henry and Edith go through a troubled patch when Edith falls in love with the colourful Angelica, whose lively presence threatens to replace Henry in her life.

John and Henry collaborate on a book about male sexuality, writing it by correspondence before they meet. But when Oscar Wilde is put on trial for sodomy, outraging polite society, their hopes of publication are threatened. Friends advise against it, but they go ahead and face the consequences.

Crewe tells his story at a cracking pace, which only falters towards the end, as if he is reluctant to take leave of his vividly drawn characters. 

He is, as the novelist Kate Atkinson states in the cover blurb, “A very fine new writer”, and I look forward to reading more of his work.