Paul, a World War 1 veteran, must choose between his lover Adam, and marrying his dead brother’s pregnant sister out of duty. This sounds like a recipe for a shrewd publisher to market this book as Brokeback Mountain in the trenches. And there are similarities: a female author tackling same-sex love in the context of a society that is not ready to even acknowledge it, save for sending gay men to prison.
But The Boy I Love isn’t just a tale of social acceptance of gay men, it captures the morality of a time where unmarried mothers were sent away to have their babies adopted; a time when even disabled war heroes are considered a social embarrasment. It seems so long ago, and also chillingly close.
The characters are drawn in a deft and tender fashion, and horrific flashbacks to the trenches are interwoven in a way that contributes to the narrative and a deeper understanding of the mens’ motivations. At other times, the incongrously modern vernacular means it is easy to forget the WW1 settting. But this doesn’t detract from the novel’s tremendous ability to move.
