PLE'S CH
books
August
Unrequited love makes this
an honest coming-of-age story
The Blue Lawn
by William Taylor $9.95, 120 pp, paper Alyson Publications
Reviewed by Kaizaad Kotwal
Coming-of-age stories have been a staple of literary explorations since the origins of storytelling. Gay coming-of-age stories have been less abundant, but as a recent phenomenon such tales are gaining in numbers and popularity.
The recent success of films like Get Real and Edge of Seventeen is proof that these stories have been waiting to be told, and that audiences are ready to devour these tales of losing innocence and becoming adult in every sense of the word.
It is also true that a lot of gay literature and of these coming-of-age stories focus in many quite a bit on sex and the hormonal coming of age as well. In truth, this sells books and movies, and is in keeping with the market trend of sexualizing youngsters earlier and earlier.
How refreshing then is the novel The Blue Lawn by William Taylor, which zooms in on the angst of gay teen love but leaves the sex unrequited, a more realistic depiction of how most teens must come of age.
In a lot of literature and much of gay cinema today, there is a lot of sex and almost all of it with gorgeous, hunky, Adonis-like boys or men. Most teenagers don't dwell in precocious fabrications of Hollywood-like (un)reality.
In The Blue Lawn, the focus is on friendship and the misty geography when the landscape of platonic bonding transforms into the rocky terrain of love, especially first love. The two protagonists of the book, David Mason and Theo Meyer, come from different worlds and yet they are drawn to each other like bees to pollen. Adolescent love in Taylor's hands is messy, turbulent, traumatic and also tender, delicate and indescribable.
It is particularly indescribable and indecipherable for the two youngsters who have feelings that their vocabularies cannot reach
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and yet they try, stumbling along in learning the language of growing up.
"
David is the 15-year-old star athlete of his school's rugby team and Theo, a year older than David, is a loner and distant to most. Theo's grandmother Gretel also plays an important role in the story. The title of the book is a reference to a garden that she nurtures much like the blooming friendship between David and Theo.
The book's honesty comes largely in part from the non-glamorous treatment of adolescent angst, particularly gay growing pains. Taylor has a good eye for mundane details that adds greatly to the “slice of life" genre of the story. From the apprehensive telephone calls between the teenagers to the sleepovers spent in simple embrace rather than the alltoo-knowing coital bliss, Taylor imbues the moments of his story with a 'less is more' aesthetic.
Anyone who has been through waiting for a phone call from one's first love (or second or third for that matter) and anyone who has known that many times language fails when it comes to love, will identify with the sweetness and the poignancy of the book.
What is also fresh about Taylor' tale is that the protagonists are conflicted individuals who are not portrayed as victims or syrupy-sweet cherubs. They are living, breathing bundles of contradictions. One ends up liking them and rooting for them, not because Taylor tells us to, but because we see them grow and change before our very eyes. The ending, not forcefully resolved like a Hollywood tale, speaks volumes about the ambiguity of the future of such first loves and the vast unknown terrain of further growing pains.
At times the metaphors in Taylor's writing can get a bit heavy handed and the grandmother sometimes reads more as a literary device than a integrally woven character. But these are minor quibbles with a novel that is simple and profound all at once.
Originally published in New Zealand in 1994, The Blue Lawn won the 1995 AIM Children's Book Award for Senior Fiction. Taylor has authored more than 15 books for
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children and young adults including Agnes the Sheep, Knitwits, and Paradise Lane. Taylor also received the prestigious Margaret Mahy Medal by the New Zealand Children's Book Foundation.
Good book covers speak volumes about the story within and The Blue Lawn is exceptional in this regard. The cover, simple as the storytelling by Taylor, shows two young boys sitting together with one touching the other's
lawn
knee in total innocence and yet indicating the strength of platonic love and the intense desire of youthful friendships.
This book is a must-read for those who need to revisit the days of first love or for parents with gay adolescents and well as the gay teens themselves. It goes a long way in chipping away at the jaded cynicism and glamorized worlds of teen sex and sexuality induced by Hollywood and pop culture at large.
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