The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

The Lawrence Browne Affair
By Cat Sebastian
Avon Impulse Publishers, 2017
Five stars

Again, Cat Sebastian has produced an elegant, compelling and emotionally rich historical romance that kept making me imagine that I was reading a gay Dickens or Trollope. I think this one tipped more toward Trollope, although the setting is earlier; soon after the defeat of Napoleon, finding England at peace and prospering. Maybe Thackeray.


What works so nicely is that Sebastian takes a very current idea – a brilliant man who today would be seen on the autism spectrum – and puts him in the context of Regency England. Lawrence Browne is the reluctant Earl of Radnor, whose penchant for esoteric scientific tinkering and his extreme social awkwardness make him seem crazy in the eyes of his time and place. As modern readers, we know better; but the author doesn’t cheat. To make things worse, both Radnor’s father and his older brother were violent, cruel and immoral reprobates; so Lawrence assumes that his own anxieties as well as his attraction to men are signs of inherited madness.


It takes someone from the margins of society to see Lawrence for who he really is. Georgie Turner, whose brother Jack was the hero of Sebastian’s previous novel, “The Soldier’s Scoundrel,” is a confidence man – a term well known in the 19th century. Having escaped the gutter like his siblings by adopting the manners and style of the gentle classes, Georgie has flimflammed his way through his youth. He ends up in Radnor’s crumbling Cornish castle posing as a secretary, because he’s in serious trouble and his brother sends him to Cornwall to check up on the mad earl for a client.


So we have two outsiders, a slovenly aristocrat who has rejected all social niceties for the shelter of his scientific experiments; and a fastidious guttersnipe captivated by the earl’s refusal to play his assigned social role. More importantly, we have two people, naturally loving and gentle, who are emotionally starved. They recognize each other’s intelligence, and can see past the prejudices of “normal” society to the innate goodness they find beneath the surface.


Sebastian is a gifted writer, and manages to toe a delicate line between authentic period feeling and readable modern prose. Although the growing love between the earl and his secretary is central to the book’s narrative, the author fills the tale with fascinating details about the early development of telegraphy and the complex community that makes up Cornish society in the 1810s. We all know that people 200 years ago had sex, but it was never acknowledged on the page, any more than other bodily functions were. This is the most modern facet of the novel, offering modern readers what we need while allowing us to experience something beyond our own era.


There is a third in this series down the road, and I know I’ll read it.

Thanks!

Ulysses wrote: "The Lawrence Browne Affair
By Cat Sebastian
Avon Impulse Publishers, 2017
Five stars

Again, Cat Sebastian has produced an elegant, compelling and emotionally rich historical romance that kept maki..."

I second what Mymymble said. :)