Mr. Clive & Mr. Page

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It is Christmas Eve, 1956, and the reclusive Mr Page is remembering a dream from thirty years ago. The dream is about the rich and wild Mr Clive, a man who could have been Page’s twin, and what really happened to the beautiful white-haired boy who served in his house. And the dream is about Clive’s house itself—ostensibly modern and spacious but in truth deeply secretive, with its invisible network of staircases, corridors and hidden rooms.

Neil Bartlett bears angry witness to the oppression of gays in the past and evokes their concealed world with dark, erotic tenderness. He is an innovative writer, creating in Mr Clive and Mr Page a non-linear narrative: the plot exists in its entirety from the start, but is submerged, hidden, like the gay world of the twenties, only becoming clear if you examine it closely enough. Bartlett’s acknowledged talent as a novelist is in no way diluted by the energy he throws into his other incarnations as actor, playwright, translator, artistic director of theatre and biographer. Mr Clive and Mr Page, short-listed for the Whitbread Novel of the Year, more than lives up to his burgeoning, multifaceted reputation. —Helen Falconer