To belief in our infinite powers and the innocent
Yet with orchestras and glances, O, you betray us She was referencing a line, of course, from Auden’s poem “The Capital”: Hannah Arendt said that it was “as if life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest the ‘heart’s invisible furies'”. Another spirit at work in this book is that of Armistead Maupin, another gay author who in his Tales of the City created a broad tableau of gay life with memorable characters and ample humor.īoyne’s title makes a nod toward the great, gay poet, W.
With the skill of a craftsman, he moves down the checklist of historical events and plot points with assured precision, shifting his story from Dublin and a homophobic Ireland dominated by the Catholic Church and the staunch conservatism of closeted lawmakers, to a liberal Amsterdam of sex trafficking and liberation, to a New York City overwhelmed by the AIDS epidemic, and then back to a more tolerant Ireland. With a nod toward the greats of Irish and British literature, Boyne fashions The Heart’s Invisible Furies-which is sometimes picaresque and sometimes a novel of manners-against a panorama of gay cultural history. Like Moll Flanders, Vanity Fair or Tom Jones with an ample dose of more contemporary novelizations such as The Goldfinch or The Nix, Boyne is determined to bring humor and heart to this witty saga. Dickensian in scope, it has all the trappings of a nineteenth century novel, with its elaborate plot points, its twists and turns of fate and coincidence, and its ribald characterizations. John Boyne’s epic covers the life of a gay Irishman, Cyril Avery, in the late half of the twentieth century from the time of his birth and adoption to his later decline and eventual death in the present day. Tim Murphy’s brilliant Christadora comes to mind as well, but the field of current gay fiction tends to focus more on the interior lives of a few gay characters in books that are smaller and more intimate. Larry Kramer’s The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart might be one. I can’t recall in recent years a more ambitious gay novel with such historical scope as John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies. ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’ by John Boyne
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