A scene set at a party she throws is one of my very favorites. There are wealthy people who are kind, perhaps too kind, and a certain baroness especially, though I adored her. There is another kind of wish fulfillment here that eventually tugged at me.

Di Canzio’s descriptions of their experiences are harrowing, tender, brutal, and comic. Alec is the product of a sexually sophisticated imagination, unlike Maurice, and so we find the lovers borrowed from Forster hard at it, so to speak, and in full enjoyment of each other. And it seems to me that among Alec’s missions is to reopen that discussion, with the question of just what Forster was doing when he wrote and published Maurice, and why. a debut with a bold premise, if also a subtle one, surrounded by some of the most conflicted critical terrain in Western literature. fiction as queer archaeology, demonstrating that looking back doesn’t necessarily mean looking backward. In nudist safe havens in the countryside at peacetime, codified arrangements between privates and majors during war, lurid encounters in Continental brothels while on leave and lively salon conversations about Hellenistic poetry post-armistice, the novel presents the many ways other 'outlaws' like Maurice and Alec successfully, if tenuously, carved out spaces for themselves. reads like an attempt to make these forgotten men feel less alone, to proliferate their stories.

There’s a sweeping romantic vision here that’s as old-fashioned as it is refreshingly modern, with this war-torn couple pining away for each other as they hold their love in the highest esteem, in bold defiance of English laws and customs. In following the couple beyond a hazily suggested happy ever after, di Canzio makes Forster’s wish for them all the more tangible as he shows these characters building a life for themselves on their own terms. Once di Canzio pushes past his borrowed characters’ figural greenwood, his goal in reanimating them becomes clearer.

Alec william di canzio