Boy Caesar

Author:   Jeremy Reed
Publisher:   Peter Owen Publishers
ISBN:  

9780720611939


Pages:   240
Publication Date:   26 November 2003
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Awaiting stock   Availability explained


Our Price $50.03 Quantity:  
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Boy Caesar


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Overview

The Roman gay world is mirrored in Jim's relations with his duplicitous partner Danny and the contemporary London scene they inhabit. Events take a weird twist when Jim discovers that his partner is living a double life as a member of a Soho cult involving bizarre sex rites on Hampstead Heath and a charismatic leader called Slut. Jim, repulsed by the cult's activities, finds his relationship with Danny at an end and that he has become a target for Slut's reprisals. He has to take refuge with a female friend, Masako with whom visits Rome to check out sites associated with Heliogabalus. She leads him to a meeting with a wealthy young man called Antonio who claims to be the emperor reincarnated. When Jim and Masako return to London, Antonio pays them a visit which leads to a conclusion every bit as dramatic as Heliogabalus' own murder. Boy Caesar more than confirms Jeremy Reed's reputation for pushing experience to the cutting edge, being an electrifying poetic re-creation of a bizarre period of ancient history as well as a narrative that dissolves boundaries of gender in the complex relationship of Jim and Masako.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jeremy Reed
Publisher:   Peter Owen Publishers
Imprint:   Peter Owen Publishers
Dimensions:   Width: 13.80cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 21.60cm
Weight:   0.186kg
ISBN:  

9780720611939


ISBN 10:   0720611938
Pages:   240
Publication Date:   26 November 2003
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Availability:   Awaiting stock   Availability explained

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Reviews

One of the most original virtuoso voices...of our fin de siecle,


Third-century emperor and twenty-first-century academic find they've got oh-so-much in common. From a.d. 218 to 221, Rome's emperor was an unlikely teenager with the unusually (even for Rome) tongue-tangling name of Heliogabalus. In the very early part of the new millennium in London, the much more simply named Jim is working on his university thesis about-you guessed it-Heliogabalus. In his introduction to this time-skipping tale, Reed (Pleasure Chateau, 2000, etc., not reviewed) mentions that he's intent on a method whereby the past will dissolve into the present, and vice versa, in the manner of a Derek Jarman film. It's an unfortunate but all-too-apt comparison, as the ensuing pages can have a tendency to be too mindful of Jarman's film Edward II-another example of a renegade artist trying to reclaim a previously vilified gay historical figure by melding time periods but getting impossibly lost in the labyrinth of its own baroque mechanics. With all that said, Heliogabalus is an undeniably fascinating character who deserves a full recounting of his reign (though he was reimagined in a 1933 Artaud work, albeit as quite more violent than the dreamy-eyed pinup boy that Reed makes him into). Half of the book is given over to his interior recollections, and it gets quite a bit of steam out of the sheer magnitude of Heliogabalus's anarchic plans. When the action shifts forward to London and the just-as-self-obsessed Jim (except he has a thing for designer labels, whereas the emperor was obsessed with color-coding gargantuan feasts), the narrative skips and stutters, abandoning the fragrant rhythms previously established in the ancient world. Reed has no problem dropping anachronisms like rent boy into the Rome-set text, a stratagem that seems too clever by half, and when Jim's and Heliogabalus's worlds start to meld forcefully, the whole thing collapses under the strain of its own pretension. What wants to be a transgressive thunderclap ends up a mildly diverting exercise. (Kirkus Reviews)


Author Information

Jeremy Reed is a prolific writer of poetry and prose, both fiction and non-fiction, with seven of his novels and five works of non-fiction published by Peter Owen. He has won the National Poetry Competition, the Eric Gregory Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. He is also the author of well-received biographies of Lou Reed, Marc Almond and Scott Walker.

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