Review: Love in a world gone mad.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 3, 2014
Think Maurice, but in an insane asylum.Cambridge graduate John Gilliam has been committed by his rich father to the Fairpark asylum to cure his unnatural urges. Lower-class Adam Tully is working as an attendant at Fairpark to earn enough money to buy his own ailing father a home for his waning years.Unlike the egotistical and narrow-minded doctors at Fairpark, however, Tully is gentle and compassionate. He is the go-to guy when a disturbed patient needs soothing.  Tully, unlike Gilliam, has successfully suppressed his illegal desires, and seeks only to care for the inmates as best he can.Until he meets John Gilliam.The classic British tradition of crossing class lines for love is alive and well in The Gentleman’s Madness. The expert team of Dee and Devon offer their readers chilling insight into the mental health practices of late Victorian England. The carefully outlined details of life in the madhouse, as well as the appalling treatments that were presumed to be effective in curing nervous disorders, suggest that the authors did their homework.Oddly enough, Fairpark Asylum reminds me of Dr. John Seward’s upscale asylum in suburban London in Dracula; all medieval torture disguised as modern-day medicine. Bram Stoker’s famous 1897 novel is in essence a metaphor for the survival of evil in spite of scientific discovery and modernization.But at Fairpark, the fearsome monster is no ancient vampire, but simply the human condition that Havelock Ellis charmingly described in 1896 as “sexual inversion.” Thus The Gentleman’s Madness becomes its own kind of metaphor for the survival of love in the face of cultural bigotry and blind faith in the infallibility of scientific method.It is no mean feat to create a tender romance in the context of the social and medical nightmares that homosexuality could trigger in the late 1880s. To show the burgeoning feelings of affection between two men, fully aware of the risk their feelings posed for them, takes a delicate touch. Dee and Devon create intense, loving  portraits of these two men, drawn to each other at first by the need of one to care for a wounded soul; but later by the growing mutual attraction that, were it to be noticed, would endanger both of their lives.While there are bad men in this book, they are not simply evil; this is a world in which good intentions and honorable beginnings can stray down evil paths. The portrayal of Gilliam’s parents is particularly disturbing, because it is clear that they are all but helpless to act in any way other than they do, because of the social pressures and cultural conventions of their class and culture.All of this makes for plenty of anxiety on the part of the reader, as we watch Tully and Gilliam move inexorably toward the very emotional climax that we, as m/m fiction fans, expect and demand.The Gentleman’s Madness maintains a period authenticity and a sense of historical precision that makes it a rewarding read, above and beyond the romance. The great nineteenth-century British novels were all romances as well, and Dee and Devon can be proud of their efforts to walk in the august footsteps of Dickens and Trollope.Keep it up, ladies.