While England Sleeps. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 27, 1993 by Tracy Lee Simmons

BRITISH readers will have to wait for this novel. The poet Stephen Spender has sued to block its publication in the United Kingdom, alleging that it contains ripoffs from his 1948 autobiography. David Leavitt, an American, has already made a name for himself as a formidable fiction writer and a homosexual--a reputation that's sure to be enhanced on both counts by this book. Brian Botsford, his English anti--hero, had joined the Communists in the glow of the Spanish Civil War, not out of revolutionary zeal but out of a tender but muddled love for Edward Phelan, a ticket-taker for the London Underground. After their meeting we are plunged into the darker precincts of homosexual life--a life lived, the reader wryly surmises, by half the city at the time. None of the charactors seem in control; most are driven by seedy appetites and live on the sly. Yet we feel for them, wonder about them, even pull for them. Botsford will regretfully confess his irrevocable mistakes, and his ruminations hint at a kind of lost innocence, however soiled for us in the telling by relentless sexual acts that dilute this otherwise compelling story of desperation and guilt.

--TRACY LEE SIMMONS

While England Sleeps, by David Leavitt (Viking, 304 pp., $22)