Oscar Wilde is reimagined in the best Literary Fiction of the week: DOOM PAINTING by A.
DOOM PAINTING by A. K. Blakemore (Granta £20, 672pp)
Doom Painting is available now
A day-by-day account of the Peasants’ Revolt over 600-plus pages might not sound appealing, but this is a tour de force.
Beginning on May 30, 1381, and ending a mere two weeks later, it’s in part the origin story of Wat Tyler, who finds himself the unwitting figurehead of the country’s discontent.
As the revolt’s ranks swell, we also move between the perspectives of an increasingly sweaty-palmed Archbishop of Canterbury, and the boy king Richard II, with whom Tyler will eventually parlay face to face.
Blakemore’s title refers to medieval paintings of the Last Judgment, and this novel is itself a teaming canvas, full of gore and grot, fervour, lust and beauty, all unfolding beneath the endless blue sky of an English summer, and written with a gleeful delight in language that’s intoxicating.
STATIONS by Louise Kennedy (Bloomsbury £20, 304pp)
Kennedy’s Women’s Prize shortlisted, note-perfect debut, Trespasses, was one of the most heartbreaking love stories of recent years.
Stations is also a love story, but this time, teenager Róisín’s passion for long-lashed, beautiful but troubled Red Camelin is unrequited.
When Red is forced from his small Irish hometown, he flees to England and Róisín soon follows.
But in their 1980s London squat, Red falls into a world of addiction, while Róisín – despite herself – falls into the arms of her schoolgirl nemesis’s brother, Barry.
Nearly 20 years later, the former lovers are reunited, but Róisín still hankers for Red, who vanished without a trace.
The intimacy of Kennedy’s storytelling, her empathy and warmth for her characters on their journey to hard-won wisdom and painful self-knowledge, is unparalleled.
THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS by John Boyne (Doubleday £20, 624pp)
The Weight of Angels is available now
This counterfactual reimagining of the life of Oscar Wilde sees the author’s lover, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, imprisoned in Reading Gaol, an experience the aristocrat immortalises in verse.
Meanwhile, Wilde himself, buoyed by a tide of champagne, lives on well into his 90s and ends up with a Nobel Prize and a peerage.
Crossing paths, and not infrequently wits, with the great and the good – everyone from Emmeline Pankhurst to Virginia and Leonard Woolf to Winston Churchill – his is a public and private life of highs and lows, clashes between sex and art, dramatic betrayals, tragic folly and, ultimately, a lesson in the primacy of love.
Boyne has clearly had a fantastic time here, feeding his Wilde a ceaseless supply of quips, bon mots, barbs and ripostes.