reviewed by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew
Toronto Star Sunday, July. 11, 2004

J.M. Barrie, author of the beloved children’s classic Peter Pan, led a dark, tragic, Victorian life at odds with the fairy tales he wrote. A pint-sized man who enjoyed the company of children, but whose marriage quickly dissolved, Barrie befriended Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her five sons. When Sylvia and her husband died, Barrie adopted the boys.

But unlike Peter Pan, the boys grew up, only to face even worse tragedies - George died fighting in WWI, Michael and his boyfriend drowned mysteriously while at Oxford and Peter committed suicide.

Manny Masters, the scholar-protagonist of Sky Gilbert’s latest novel, An English Gentleman is on a research quest to prove that Barrie was a caring, albeit closeted, mentor to his adopted sons, not the gay pedophile some academics accuse him of being.

Manny is the loveable, chaste and learned sort of aging gay man he believes Barrie was. He’s a fan of the performing arts, particularly musicals: "Of course, once a month I listen to Miss Marmelstein just to remind myself that life is worth living, and that Barbara Streisand was once brilliant." He lives in a spacious, rent-controlled apartment in New York City within blocks of his mother, and is quite content to be a high school drama teacher, although he’s had ample opportunity to become a professor.

Unfortunately he’s also bitter, repressed and highly critical of the gay community: "Think of the evil men do to boys in the name of homosexuality. Think of the ageism, the body fascism, the superficiality, the depression, the quiet sleazy desperation of gay lives," he writes. "I mean, the sad, tasteless absurdity just goes on and on."

An English Gentleman is, in part, a pedantic personal essay. Perfectly suited to Manny’s character, this intellectual narrative describes his fascination with J.M. Barrie’s relationship to his adopted son Michael. Although much of the research Manny cites is real, Sky Gilbert cleverly inserts 56 fictionalized letters between Barrie and his late son Michael into the text for Manny to analyze and footnote with all his naïve, and idealistic, albeit judgmental rhetoric.

Manny describes the letters as "the purest, sweetest thing you may ever read," but the letters reveal a steadily disintegrating relationship between a demanding, Victorian father-figure and a wild romantic struggling with depression, night terrors and his desire for open homosexuality. Barrie wants to teach Michael the dignity and control of an English gentleman; Michael dreams of a free, bohemian life in Paris.

Instead of interpreting Michael’s death as an accident, Manny believes it’s a Victorian hara-kiri. Still convinced of the utopian value of intergenerational love, Manny attempts to follow Barrie’s example and takes in his own vulnerable young man, determined to be his mentor and shape him into a marvelous novelist.

Parts of An English Gentleman are full of dark, gossipy candor. Manny pokes fun at older men with Hummers from Chelsea with "that slightly saggy quality that typifies aging gay men who spend too much time at the gym."

He is highly critical of superficiality, especially in young men with flashy clothes: "The word ’pimp’ came to mind as soon as I had processed the overall picture. He was - according to cultural signposts at least - the gayest thing I had ever, in my life, had the displeasure of encountering."

Most of the novel, however, plods along in relentless debate. Theoretical aspects of intergenerational love and the value of queer academic analysis are hashed out while Manny questions the difference between mentorship and pedophilia. This is an intelligent, albeit difficult, examination of gay culture, love, literary history, and failed idealism that will appeal to secret scholars and bore fans of American Idol.

In a solitary search for a perfect form of love, Gilbert (now a professor at Guelph University) has his protagonist tirade against all forms of sex and the perceived excesses of the gay community to the point of tedium.

Just when you become angry at Gilbert for making you read through a couple hundred pages of increasingly contentious bluster, however, he wallops Manny with a comeuppance. Manny’s protégé, Alan Peche, then jumps aboard, steering the narrative in an entirely different direction, a spirited Peter Pan to Manny’s dour Captain Hook