Edmund White his is a thoroughly English novel in one way and totally exotic in another. What is undeniably English about the writing is the delicate sense of social comedy, the oblique silliness, all insinuation and suspension points, and the zanily camp humour, not to mention the rapturous response to the Dorset countryside and even to a horrid Victorian country house.
Nothing here is lurid, however, or mechanical.
Imagine a male Smiles of a Summer Night and you ll have some sense of the lyricism of this remarkable novel. For instance, Robin, an architect in his 40s, moves a new man, Justin, into the house he d bought and decorated with a lover who has died. Here the mix of sex and shame, of desire and mourning, is very subtle, slightly shocking - and convincingly true. The Spell zigzags back and forth between London and the village with all the moral and topological precision of a Jane Austen novel. An all-night rave for gay Londoners in the usually tranquil village is one of the climactic scenes, a brutal enjambement of two distinct worlds.