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PAGE SIX
A REVIEW OF MARY RENAULT'S TEE CHARIOTEER
Mary Renault is one of the better second-order novelists writing today, and heir
writing in The Charioteer shows a careful, reasonable command of classic style and
themes. The core of The Charioteer is the contrast of Platonic and physical love in
Plato s Phaedo—the setting is .Gay and the treatment refreshingly reserved and non—
sensationalistic, and for these reasons the novel can be enjoyable, even thought'—
provoking, reading—totally without bed-scenes, thougji; that two of the main char
acters were sleeping together I noticed only after it had been going on, so to speak,
for weeks.
But the novel's ending has left me and others unsatisfied, missing the feeling
of liberation which accompanies Renault's open, enlightened treatment in the rest of
the story, Laurie Odell, the novel's main character, has two prospective lovers durl
his convalescence from war injuries after Dunkirk. One is Andrew, a sensitive, radl-
ca , strong Quaker C.O, who works at the hospital where he is recuperating, who is
ove Laurie, although without any concept of gayness—a Platonic lover in
Laurie's other prospect is Ralph, a school friend for whom Laurie has
p ne since adolescence, whom Laurie encounters at a gay party. Renault's s)rmpathies
seem to lie with Andrew—Ralph is something of a queer chauvinist pig, whose self-
re worldly wisdom borders on domineering—yet when Laurie finally opts for
riendship with Ralph in order to avoid violating Andrew's Innocence, his choice is
represented as somehow heroic, admirable and manly.
♦ u other attempts in fiction to create a Model Queer. Faced
wit this version of Gayness, I see rather the futile self-limitation and ultimately
insulting patronization which such attempts entail. Above all, the conviction that
love untainted by sexuality should be an untouchable ideal, that the refusal to admit
that one (and the oneonemay love) is a body—and not pure Platonic soul—should be
considered not dopey or even sick but rather beautiful—that conviction represents
a stumbling block to liberation not only of Gays but of everybody. Women, Blacks,
Queers, workers all have been characterized as mean but necessary body which pure
and noble mind must dominate and hold in check. This prejudice liesat the root of
Laurie s silly reluctance to admit his love to his friend and—well, he deserves
what he gets.
One particularly interesting facet of Renault's Model Queer is his acceptance
of the fallacy that "Gay is Gay and straight is straight and ne'er the twain shall .
meet. ' This sort of thinking is an Invention of heterosexual sublimation and has no
backing in modem sexual theory since Freud, which takes general bisexuality as its
cornerstone. The promise to tolerate queers, as long as they keep to themselves,
is a defense maneuver to keep the unnatural one-sided heterosexual identity—
especially male identity—unquestioned and unchallenged, on which the structure of
sexist discrimination rests.
In assenting to this you/us compromise (as is done for example in some CGA
Outreach panels) we, like Laurie, deserve what we get—as much as we might have
deserved what we surrender.
—Allan Brown