Toby Johnson: Toby Johnson is Editor of White Crane: A Journal of Gay Men's Spirituality, where this review was originally published in v.52 (Spring 2002). It is reprinted with permission from www.whitecranejournal.com online.
This is a lovely little book, a fast and enjoyable read, that in the end is liable to bring tears to your eyes.
Though called a novel, it's more a collection of short stories with an interweaving cast of characters. Toward the end, the stories all come together and the reader can see connections that hadn't been apparent earlier. This recapping—and recasting—of the several stories lines is one of the joys of the book.
There's a frame for the whole collection that, frankly, this reviewer didn't think necessary and, indeed, a little inflated. However, it does function to establish the spiritual intent and meaning of the stories.
This frame—from which arises the title—presents the book as a continuation of the story of Genesis, explaining what happened on the “eighth day of creation” when God began to mold human vices and virtues. The opening story, for instance, follows from God's playing a tune on a flute given him by the Archangel Michael. The tune, it turns out, is called “hatred.” The tale of hatred involves an academic fellow, named Logan, who falls in love with a professional fighter and whose life seems to be ruined when the fighter, unfaithful to him, gets infected with HIV and then transmits it to him—a turn of events that naturally stirs hatred.
The stories then each manifest the tunes God is playing on that flute: guilt, fear, pride, then joy and finally love.
The story of guilt tells of a family crisis when a husband and father decides he is gay; fear of a professional tennis star who is faced with exposure of his homosexuality; pride of a beautiful young man who romantically and sexually befriends and beguiles a boy confined to a wheelchair, and then drops him. All very serious stuff, with a an undercurrent of tragedy.
In the end, love conquers—of course. And it's a lovely ending that brings back the character of Logan now dying himself of AIDS, but with a much better death than the opening story would have led the reader to expect, and recaps the story of the family crisis as an example of gay love lasting over fifty years.
You have to wonder why God started with the traumatic tunes, but the message of the book is finally that so much of the pain and confusion in life is ultimately redeemed by love.
This book turned out to be surprisingly appealing. While unassuming and simple, it deserves your attention. The message of virtue in the midst of pain and trauma in gay men's lives is one you'll probably resonate with.
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