Sleeping for England

The debut book by the acclaimed young US writer, David Leavitt, the fiction collection Family Dancing, published in 1984, immediately impressed critics. His reputation grew with the novel The Lost Language of Cranes (1987). Intense, assured and serious, Leavitt's work is good if relentlessly preoccupied with gay sexuality. However, with the publication of the novel While England Sleeps in 1993, Leavitt ran into serious difficulties and faced libel charges from English poet Stephen Spender who accused Leavitt of plagiarising his life. The book was withdrawn, changed and re-published in the US in 1995. Now the first British edition (Abacus, £6.99 in UK), with an additional couple of changes, shows the American making a fair attempt at writing an atmospheric English period novel. Sex is the central theme, and the narrator, Brian Bostford, a writer chappie, is a middle-class boy who gets involved with a loving working-class lad. Class tensions and rampaging sexual appetites dictate the pace, and the narrator is only marginally sympathetic. The book is good enough, if susceptible to all the cliches of 1930s English homosexuality, and leaves one wondering why Spender was so ready to claim it as the story of his life.