Tom Crewe’s virtuoso debut The New Life is one of the most embodied historical novels I have read. The tone is set in the extraordinary opening scene. It’s London in 1894, and John is jostled against another man in a tube carriage, “close enough to smell the hairs on the back of the man’s neck”. John has an erection, “cramped” flat against the man’s body, and the man begins to move his buttocks against him. As the scene becomes more openly outrageous – the man unbuttons his flies and reaches in – it becomes clear that this is a dream. It’s a dangerous literary move but it succeeds, because it’s immediately evident that this is a novel about an erotic life that’s as yet unrealisable. From the constrictive comfort of his marital bed, John is dreaming his way into a future yet to be born.
John Addington is one of two married men who will soon collaborate on a book entitled Sexual Inversion, based on the real 1897 book of the same name by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds. Crewe’s Addington has got to a point where he’s prepared to risk everything for lust, and for openness about who he is, because he is “dying” from the feeling that he’s wasted his life and destroyed his wife’s life in the process. Just when he’s begun discreetly circulating a celebration of homosexuality in ancient Greece to his friends, he’s propositioned by a man in the park and quickly moves him into his marital home as his secretary. In this febrile, ecstatic and guilty state, he encounters an article by Henry Ellis declaring that “morality is thus the normal activity of a healthy nature”. He then writes wishfully to Ellis and their collaboration begins.
