Intricate and finely crafted ... There is always a narrative risk when recapitulating events in historical fiction — predetermination can deaden the pulse. Crewe, who earned his Ph.D. in 19th-century British history from the University of Cambridge, makes no such error. He attentively constructs rich, human motivations and contradictions for his fictionalized renderings of John and Henry ... Crewe uses the interior depth of John and Henry to build intrigue, creating provocative developments even without the use of overtly dramatic plot points ... The New Life brims with intelligence and insight, impressed with all the texture (and fog) of fin de siècle London. Crewe’s prose is stylish and precise, reminiscent of Alan Hollinghurst’s. The novel falters only in its later chapters, when John begins a self-destructive streak that is too flatly written to be believable. Otherwise, the writing is exquisite ... For all its historical fixtures, the novel is energized by timeless questions.
Lyrical, piercing ... Lends a contemporary urgency to an exploration of same-sex intimacy and social opprobrium ... Crewe...knows this milieu like the back of his hand, conjuring it in all its immediacy and richness ... His characters shine ... A tension kindles between his precise, graceful sentences and his graphic scenes of sex, capricious as the music of an Aeolian harp ... A fine-cut gem, its sentences buffed to a gleam, but with troubling implications for our own reactionary era ... Crewe keeps one eye on the past and the other on the future; his book brims with élan and feeling, an ode to eros and a lost world, and a warning about the dangers ahead.
Nothing less than remarkable ... What beautiful prose it is. Crewe’s writing is subtly intricate, gorgeous, though never precious or showy ... Stunning ... A beautiful, brave book that reminds us of the terrible human cost of bigotry; this is a novel against forgetting.
In The New Life, Crewe distinguishes himself both as novelist and as historian. He has clearly done what G. M. Young, the great scholar of Victorian England, once recommended: to read until one can hear the people speak. Crewe’s Victorians do indeed sound like human beings, not period-piece puppets. He has, more unusually, found a prose that can accommodate everything from the lofty to the romantic and the shamelessly sexy ... The element of “alternate history” is all the more potent for its subtlety. Crewe is not trying, wishfully, to give his characters the happy endings they were denied in life ... Their acute awareness of being born too early for happiness is what gives Crewe’s characters their poignancy. In their hopeless dreams of integrity, they embody the perennial tragedy of the utopian.
Crewe...freely adapts the facts, supplying a bibliography in the afterword for readers in need of mere accuracy ... Because Crewe is writing in the twenty-first century, he is able to focus on details that would probably have seemed to Symonds too coarse to mention ... To fully accurate representation of the claustrophobia of yore, however, might not make for an amiable story, which The New Life is. Crewe has shaped and pruned, as an artist must, and the gist of his retelling seems honest to me. The progress of the characters through the phases of their relationships can seem a little schematic, like the movements of actors who have been given blocking instructions but haven’t yet found a natural-looking way to carry them out, and Crewe sometimes describes the light in a room a little too poetically for my taste. But the reader is drawn forward by the wish to know which secrets will and won’t be disclosed, and which loves will and won’t be requited.
Crewe’s virtuoso debut The New Life is one of the most embodied historical novels I have read ... Crewe’s brilliance – in addition to his ability to make us feel the physical sensations – is in dramatising moral dilemmas with complexity and rigour. He’s especially good at exploring the perennial conflict between private and public acts of courage and openness.
Atmospheric ... As much as for its story, The New Life is compelling for its stylistic flair. Crewe’s taut prose is shot through with descriptive vividness ... Occasionally the measured quality of the writing induces the desire for some kind of rupture, a break (however transient) into a different register, though that impulse is of a piece with the psychological realism: we inhabit the characters’ striving after some other state of being.
There is much to admire in The New Life. Crewe has a confident feeling for his historical moment — with its stifling norms, intellectual neuroses and crushing high-mindedness — and an atmosphere that’s all the more impressively evoked since the principal drama of the age, Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment, is kept off stage throughout ... The book more or less lacks a comic dimension ... Come the denouement, Crewe thrills a little too indulgently at the moral complexity of the situations he contrives for his characters. It is as if the complexity, rather than anything else, is the point; and once all the moral ambiguities have been thoroughly spelt out the book ends a little lamely ... Nevertheless, The New Life is an accomplished debut, on a stimulating theme, by an obviously talented new writer with the promise of more and better to come.
Crewe has his own rich and engrossing style, though, and his own approach to plot dynamics, concluding the story with a dramatic trial sequence that captures a mood of both frustration and defiance, blending the graceful ambiguity of literary fiction with the deftness of a page-turner ... A smart, sensual debut.
Auspicious ... Crewe uses meticulously researched period details to great effect, and rounds out the narrative with solid characters and tight pacing. Readers will look forward to seeing what this talented author does next.
