In 1895, four days after the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest, the Marquess of Queensberry left a card at Oscar Wilde’s club that publicly accused him of “posing as a somdomite”. Instead of instigating the libel case that led to his imprisonment and early death in a Paris hotel just five years later, what would have happened if Wilde had simply torn that card up? John Boyne’s new novel sets out to answer that intriguing question.
For starters, Boyne contrives a fate for Wilde’s beloved Lord Alfred Douglas which entertainingly redistributes the details of the real Wilde’s life before, during and after his time in Reading jail. This sets up the novel’s cat-and-mouse game with the history it is reimagining. Wilde himself, conveniently released from marriage by the early death of his wife, is then free to live not as a tortured, scandal-haunted genius, but as a randy, wisecracking, party-going queen. The upside of this is that Oscar gets to swap bons mots with a crowded cast list of celebrities; the downside is that he shows little sign of the troubled and radical mind that produced the real Wilde’s late journalism and fiction, never mind the subversive linguistic pyrotechnics of The Importance.
