In a recent podcast discussion of The Indian Clerk, David Leavitt’s new book, Sam Tanenhaus made reference to the impact of the author’s While England Sleeps (1993), perhaps because both are historical novels. There was something about the description of While England Sleeps I found fascinating, and having eventually secured a used copy (through the internet) from a bookstore in Nova Scotia, I got a chance this week to settle down and read it. I am sometimes jokingly called “the professor of dirty books” here at the University of Lethbridge because I teach modern fiction, but there were passages in this novel that made even me blush. Perhaps that might be distinction enough, but I can recommend this work because of its remarkable wider achievement.
The novel tells the story of Brian Botsford, a young British toff who falls in love with a ticket-taker on the London underground. The attraction between the two men is palpable, and one could be forgiven for getting caught up in the candid descriptions of their coupling. Indeed, for some readers I imagine this might be an impediment that cannot be overcome. But beyond a detailed examination of what men could do to each other behind closed doors (and sometimes out in the open), While England Sleeps might be most noteworthy for its depiction of Edward Phelan, the young man from Upney who times how quickly he can read individual pages of a novel and keeps track of his stealth assault against the English class system in a notebook. The impossibly sweet and devoted Phelan, think Jennifer Cavalleri from Love Story (1970), is betrayed by our philandering protagonist, but Botsford’s real betrayal is in his assumption that he should eventually try to find a wife. Leavitt’s discussion of sexuality is deft: does our sexuality somehow define us, or is our sexuality simply what we do? Can distinctions be thus slippery, and how might we betray ourselves (and other) by trying to have (and be) everything? Phelan eventually flees England to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and British class distinctions are here further interrogated. But, by this time, the novel is virtually spent, saved only by Botsford’s meditations on physical love and, ultimately, loss. Indeed, there is an awful lot of unnecessary apparatus here: Botsford narrates his story from the 1970s, explaining how he wrote the novel as a blacklisted screenwriter in the 1950s. Leavitt’s broad canvas makes loss more poignant, but the heart of the book is in England and Spain in the 1930s.
I have had students return to me at the end of a semester books to which they object. The news is filled these days with removing books from library shelves. But I judge books on their importance: do they do something noteworthy? do they show me something I have not seen before? do they look at the familiar in a different manner? do they give me something that stays with me? I know I will always remember Edward Phelan, and this realization is what distinguishes While England Sleeps.
