The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Matthew Langford, loved and pampered son of a self-made man and a doting mother, finds out on his 21st birthday that he has a twin brother, from whom he was separated as an infant. He finds out that the twin, Tremaine Wheal, is fraternal, and in terms of looks, they share only their eyes. Awkwardly, while they hit it off immediately, Matt discovers that he reacts to his long-lost twin as if he were also a cute guy to whom he’s immediately attracted.

I’ve no problem with consensual sex between relatives, despite cultural taboos. The premise here is that, having never known each other, but having felt a something missing all their lives, these two young men respond as more than just brothers, and with all the instant emotional intensity of long-separated twins. There’s a nice prince-and-pauper aspect in that Tremaine grew up poor and is now orphaned. Matt is literally his only family.

The lack of deep trauma in the book didn’t bother me; at the core of the story is the understandable anxiety over a profound cultural taboo. But Lyons makes the point that taboos are purely cultural and exist for reasons that don’t necessarily hold true in every situation. So the fact that the story runs remarkably smoothly from horror to acceptance (both from the boys themselves and from those who find out) didn’t bother me. It is a modern world we’re in, after all, and “Separation” makes a cogent and contextualized argument for the rightness of this relationship.

My only gripe with “Separation” is that it is the kind of love story that could have been a serious, beautiful literary exploration of taboo and longing and the very idea that another person completes you. Louise Lyons does a workmanlike job building up these characters, but she doesn’t make them into memorable, “Wuthering Heights” level literary figures—and I think they deserve it. She includes the parents importantly, but they, too don’t become significant literary figures. They are more than ciphers, but not much more. It’s all so prosaic. This story wanted something gorgeous in terms of writing, and the whole book feels too short and too streamlined to really pack any impact beyond the initial titillation of twincest and the author’s heartfelt effort to look closely at a major taboo and break it down.

This isn’t a bad book at all; but it could have been much more powerful.