Ninth Meeting: The Charioteer

June's meeting of Eat, Drink, and Be Literary was hosted by my friend and former roommate Matt. He picked a book called The Charioteer, by Mary Renault. The story was about Laurie, a young british soldier in WWII who also happened to be gay. He struggled with these feelings and with who he wanted to be, and found himself quickly caught in a love triangle- one side he is being pulled by Andrew, a very innocent concientious objector o the war with whom he has an innocent love that neither of them act on, and on the other side, he is being pulled by Ralph, a young man that Laurie had gone to school with when he was young. Ralph is not innocent like Andrew, at all, and in many ways acts as a mentor to Laurie as he discovered himself and what his sexual-identity was.

The book was really difficult to read-- perhaps our most difficult yet! For one thing, the book was written in the 1950's, and for another thing, the book was written by a British woman. So, the vernacular and style were basically foreign. However, there were times when the language used was absolutely poetic. The writing is much more flowery than is found in today's novels, and in between the vague and hard-to-understand sections were beautiful descriptions.


For me, something that made the book even more difficult was that I didn't really like any of the characters. In fact, my alliance laid more with the peripheral characters in the story than Laurie or his two loves. Also, I embarrassingly interpreted all 1950's British slang as innuendo.... and I found out at the meeting that I wasn't the only one who experienced this!

The discussion of the book was one of our best yet. It was a small group this time (only six), probably because of the difficulty of the book, but six of us showed up with treats and ideas in hand. As usual, we were divided on our opinions of the book, but we all agreed that we didn't quite know what happened. Thank goodness Beth (who majored in English literature in college) was there to explain everything to us! Matt asked some great questions that really made me appreciate the story more. After having the plot re-explained to us, we discussed the symbolism in the book, and then whether we thought the book was still relevant today. We also talked about the author who wrote the book partially based on personal experience. Ms. Renault was working as a nurse during the war, and was a lesbian. She wrote the story based on gay soldiers she had befriended, and presumably also relied on her own experience while in search for her gay identity in a time where there was no such thing.


Though I didn't particularly like reading the book, my opinion towards it after our discussion is a lot higher.