New Life: An enthralling novel about forbidden desire set against the backdrop of the Oscar Wilde trial

‘I will not lie like Wilde did… The law frightens us into lies: it is how the country is allowed to pretend, most of the time, that we do not exist.’London, 1894. As a new century hovers on the horizon, brimming with possibilities of a new and evolved way of life, two men collaborate on a bold but dangerous project: to write a scientific book that intends to challenge the laws that criminalize homosexuality.Both are respectable, married men, though each is battling his own personal conundrum: John Addington, after years of futile self-repression, embarks on a passionate love affair with a younger, working-class man; Henry Ellis, newly married and irrepressibly shy, finds his wife falling in love with another woman. However, the sudden bombshell of Oscar Wilde's indecency trials upends their plans. How far will they go to defend individual freedoms when the personal cost is so high?Inspired by real-life personages, but marvellously repurposed through fiction to examine deeper truths, "The New Life" is gorgeously written and vividly conjures the late-19th century as a time of both immense social possibility and claustrophobic moral stasis. It is admittedly slow to start, but builds carefully into a charged human drama about sex and desire and freedom, and does not shy away from exploring the tangled ways in which personal quandaries become intensely political.This is a novel to be savoured rather than consumed in a large gulp, and is all the more rewarding for it.

I am an intellectual historian who has written about JA Symonds, and I have just finished reading Tom Crewe’s The New Life. I am torn about the book.I am very pleased that someone has written a book about Symonds and Ellis and their project. And that they have done so in a way that does not try to hide the difficulties that writing the book caused for those around them.My overarching problem with the book is that I do not feel that the fundamental conceit of the book really works. The conceit is that Addington is not really Symonds, and Henry Ellis is not really Havelock Ellis. To my mind, the core facts and frame of the book are insufficiently different from those of the real life Symonds and Ellis. Hence, reading the book I felt constantly that this slightly counterfactual character meant that it was an ersatz biography, rather than being a work of fiction or a true biography.The relationships between may of the characters are problematic. For example, (i) Carpenter was far more indebted and subordinate to Symonds than he is portrayed in the book; (ii) the Wilde trial did not begin until after Symonds’ death, which makes Symonds and Ellis far more unusual than comes across in the book and far more different from Wilde; and (iii) the implied portrayal of Symonds’ courage relative to Ellis’ (ultimately) cowardice is misleading, in the sense that in reality it was Ellis who finished the book and got it published (Symonds was not involved in the final 4 years of the project, due to being dead).Related to this, I do feel that it would have added depth to the ersatz Symonds character if the book had engaged with (or effectively acknowledged) his friendships with some very significant intellectual figures of the age. There is an allusion to Henry Sidgwick towards the end of the book, but no mention of one of his most important friendships with the British idealist philosopher and social reformer Thomas Hill Green (1836-82). Several years after the friendship grew up between Green and Symonds, Green married Symonds’ sister Charlotte.Personally, I would have liked a deeper and more insightful treatment of the experiences of Symonds’ wife Catherine, with whom I have always had immense sympathy. Both she and Symonds were trapped – Symonds by convention, his father’s expectations and initially by his hope that marriage would “cure” his homosexuality. But Catherine was trapped later, by Symonds, who eventually seems to have forced her to suffer his affairs – clearly, that’s in the book – but in reality often to do so while living abroad away from her friends and family in England (largely in Davos).Symonds also comes across as a far less intellectual character and therefore less interesting character than he actually was. He was a major scholar of the Renaissance and an ethical/cultural socialist. The former of these is downplayed to the point of being effectively absent from the book, and the latter is completely absent.

We often take for granted the enormous risks and leaps of faith taken by those first activists, writers and thinkers who spawn social movements. This fictional tale thrillingly and beautifully captures characters that risked everything they knew of the world to break through the madness that treated queer people as criminals. The characters are complex and deeply human (ie: flawed, with all the attendant consequences). The treatment is absolutely gorgeous. The family and relationship dynamics benefit from tremendous insights by the author, but delivered in a convincing voice of a classical Victorian novel. A beautiful and extraordinary book.

Civil rights can never be taken for granted. As a queer man, I’m well aware the rights and freedoms I enjoy every day were fought tooth and polished nail for.When I think of the heavy lifting, though, my mind rarely reaches beyond Stonewall five or so decades ago. Tom Crewe’s debut novel The New Life reminds us that the challenge to heteronormativity started long before then.London, 1894, a year before the Oscar Wilde gross indecency trials that would put homosexuality on every front page. Women know their place; inverts don’t have one. Nature finds a way, beyond reach of the lamp light in alleyways or behind a veil in the poems of Whitman.In intellectual circles and clandestine pamphlets, talk emerges of a New Life, beyond the corner of a new century: an enlightened time when sexuality is examined scientifically, women join the conversation and relationships break old moulds.The New Life is loosely based on the lives of John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, who together wrote Sexual Inversion, a revolutionary book that challenged prejudices about male homosexuality.This is no dry archival account. Crewe is a historian, and the text brims with vivid detail and vibrant colour, rescuing the characters from period abstraction. The prose is pure rhythm and melody – I caught myself re-reading passages out loud just to listen to the sound some sentences made.Nor is it hagiography. John and Henry (as they’re known here) are multi-faceted human beings, with complex personal motives they don’t always fathom. Their work is both heroic and selfish, liberating and likely to land collaborators in jail, hopeful yet harmful to the ones they love. While this is a book about men’s fears and desires, the women are given a powerful voice when speaking about their condition and aspiration, one that resonates through the ages.It is also - unafraid of its own subject - very sexy, moments of cinematic sensuality piercing through the wall of time. The New Life is less about social justice than the inexorable force of lust, how sexual desire cannot be contained, appetites of the body overriding the mind to lay society’s best (and most coercive) intentions to waste.

I'm glad I read this but I won't re read it. The subject matter is inherently interesting but the narrative stops periodically for spells of not particularly good over writing. A good editor would have reduced it by a about a fifth.

Tom Crewe’s novel is a fictional account loosely based upon LGBT people finding a way forward to live authentic lives, living married in different ways-some separately with lovers and others together having children. The times are rocky after the Oscar Wilde trials in Edwardian times.