... stunning ... Roberts’s lachrymose gay novel is nine years overdue in becoming a sensation here ... It’s a story as old as time, but, to my mind, it’s never been told so effectively, principally because Roberts invests us emotionally in both sides of the tug-of-war ... Tom, the object of desire, remains a cipher throughout. But Marion and Patrick come alive in their respective sections, serving as complicated, convincing and, at times, justifiably petty protagonists. Roberts is terrific at sensory details ... The novel’s real achievement lies in how Roberts recodes the stereotypical desires of a straight, provincial woman and a fey, posh, gay man ... It’s not a happy story. It’s better than that, fraught and honest.
... dashing ... Roberts brings her 1950s setting to life with evident pleasure in period props, scents and colours ... While it is interesting to compare Marion's and Patrick's versions of events, and especially their different feelings for Tom, the juxtaposition is a formal oddity, with Patrick's diary entries floating free of the scenario – Marion frantically scribbling her manuscript in the bungalow and storing it in the kitchen drawer – that Roberts has so carefully contrived ... But she writes persuasively about both these characters, who find themselves in conflict not only with the rules governing sexual behaviour but with the desires signalled by their own bodies. Her novel is a humane and evocative portrait of a time when lives were destroyed by intolerance.
Roberts deploys her research carefully, honing a novel with a strong period feel and a sprightly structure ... I wasn't convinced by the melodrama of the conclusion but the novel does capture the enforced evasiveness practiced before the partial decriminalization of gay sex in 1967.
... teems with sexual tension and the innocence and ignorance that caused so much heartache in the intolerant era just before the sexual revolution. This story is beautifully written and ineffably sad.
... poignantly depicts a love triangle that tears apart three lives ... Roberts tells the story through Patrick’s journal and Marion’s confessions, which she pens in 1999 while caring for Patrick following his stroke. Their accounts make for riveting but occasionally uncomfortable reading. Marion doesn’t seem particularly kind, while Patrick endangers himself by writing about his feelings and actions, since being gay was illegal at the time ... Scenes of seaside Brighton and the era’s repressive attitudes are skillfully rendered.
... complex and nuanced ... Roberts cleverly changes narrators to provide alternate perspectives on the developing intricacies and intimacies, and is especially good with the sections in which Patrick describes the challenges of being gay in 1950s Britain, a period when sex between men was illegal and gay people were subjected to blackmail. It adds up to a moving depiction of human passions, frailties, and struggles.
Roberts beautifully captures the devastation of being unable or unwilling to live in one’s truth, and the quiet ending offers a poignant moment of respite for everyone ... A melancholy story about love, loss, and unnecessary suffering.
