Boring novels of the supposedly homosexual nature, or how I learned to love even Thomas Hardy.

:sigh: read Maurice by E.M. Forster on recommendation from the tolkien_slash list as being a good novel for portraying gay relationships between two men. Apart from the fact that it's a fairly fast read, I was utterly misled. It's boring as hell, barely states anything, let alone the damn relationship with Alec the groundskeeper that Maurice actually leaves his whole normal life and society for. It doesn't even do a fade-to-black that most novels do, where you at least get the impression that something's going to happen. All right, so I'm probably a bigger better faster more product of this generation, but dammit, fucking Jane Austen states it less obliquely than this!

Besides, Maurice is a twit, Clive is a twit, and Alec barely makes an appearance. The only inkling you've got that they've done anything more than talking is when Maurice suddenly says 'yes, I've done everything with Alec, including giving him all my body, and I was sleeping with him the whole time I was staying at you place.' Christ, you could've at least alluded to it at the time... Fucking Jeeves and Wooster novels have more subtext than this, and you only have to see that if you choose to! Oh, and you know something? The Clive relationship/moping about Clive takes up at least a third of the book. Alec? Six bloody pages. I hope when they filmed it they got something out of it. I'm never reading E. M. Forster again, I can tell you that. I'd even read Hardy, at least that has some story.