The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Finding Home
By Liam Livings
Published by Fluffy Cat Publishing, 2020
Four stars

Historical novels set in the 1950s are doubly shocking. First, they remind us that the world has changed so very much in the past 65 years – socially, physically, culturally. Secondly, they shock me because I am forced to remember that I was alive in the 1950s. “Finding Home” may be a book about another time, but it still a book about my time. I was only 3 in 1958, but still.

Launched with a tender interlude during World War II in Rome in 1944, we meet Edward, a nurse, and Freddie, a wounded soldier, in a prologue that brings to mind Mary Renault’s remarkable 1953 novel, “The Charioteer.” Mary Renault, however, never imagined how much the world would change, and so it is that the rest of Livings’s book, mostly set in 1958, tries—rather successfully—to tell a story that must have happened in some way, but was never written. The repression of gay men in England has been the subject of many novels by British authors in recent times, mostly because gay men had no voice of any consequence (neither did lesbians, but they were not in the same kind of legal danger in the UK). E.M. Forster’s poignant novel, “Maurice,” was written and revised several times between 1913 and 1960, but not published until the author was dead – precisely to protect his reputation as an author. I forgave Forster his cowardice because he gave us a happy ending. Both “The Charioteer” and “Maurice” are the progenitors of “Finding Home,” and speak to the need of young gay writers today to honor the voiceless men of the past who, despite everything, managed to live their best lives.

The British class system is just as much a centerpiece of this novel as the repressed lives of gay men. As of 2020, the UK’s class divisions appear to have faded, but still exist in subtle, deeply-rooted ways. After all, the UK still has an active aristocracy, not to mention a monarchy. The United States’s class system, on the other hand, has always been rather fraudulent, since the only thing that has ever truly mattered in the USA is money. Thus, for an American reader, the relationship between Freddie – the low-born rural farmhand – and Edward, the affluent middle-class, public-school surgeon – can at times be a bit of a head-scratch. For me, however, it was both fascinating and emotionally engaging. For less literary Americans, this is Lady Sybill Crawley marrying the Irish chauffeur on “Downton Abbey.” I’m sure lots of American viewers thought, “So what? He’s cute. Go for it, Sybill.”

I love that Livings takes enormous care to draft Freddie’s character in three dimensions. He is not some stereotypical farmer – he’s (dare I say it?) almost American in his complexity. He is a rugged (but gentle) individualist, who has faced the horrors of war and equal darkness on the home front since his return. He is not just some beefy fantasy for an over-educated toff. By the same token, Edward embodies all the British ideals of good breeding – looks, education, professional ambition, and elegance. Like Freddie, however, he is more complicated, struggling with his own truth against the punitive expectations of middle-class pretension. For all his Englishness, Edward feels oddly American, and thus recognizable to a reader such as I.

Both of these men have narrowly missed the worst consequences of being gay in the UK in the 1950s. Edward is saved by his parents’ snobbish shame; while Freddie is saved by an unexpected bit of live-and-let-live tolerance (something we forget about as actually existing back then). Both young men are fearful for their futures; they have to weigh their sense of self against their attraction to each other. What Livings does that is especially rewarding is that he takes their attraction far beyond the physical. Edward sees Freddie for who he is. Interestingly, it is Freddie who has a harder time forgiving Edward his affluent background. Oddly enough, that’s an aspect of the narrative that resonates with American culture, where we have been taught to be suspicious of the elite, even as we worship wealth. (That may be why movie stars have become our aristocracy.)

In the end, it is two complex, richly painted characters and their emotional baggage that drag us into the heart of this novel. Liam Livings has done a fine job opening a window into a past that we need to remember, especially those of us who, like the author, were not born into it.