The Officer and the Gentleman by J.P. Bowie

[reviews_and_ramblings]

The Officer and the Gentleman is a novella which starts in a good way and ends in a wonderful one. Robert is a wealthy scotsman: he inherited from his grandfather a good amount of money and this allows him to live as he likes without have to worry of what people think of him. But he is not a careless man, he was not brought up in a supportive and happy family, his late grandfather was not a caring man, and probably Robert lacks the warm of a family. Plus Robert is gay and his only lover left him for the New World: it's not clear if it was real love or simply a friend with benefits relationship, it seems to me that Robert misses more the friend than the lover.

Robert is in London to visit and he befriends a young girl without dowry he finds interesting but not in a sexual way; he is a lot more interested in that way in her brother Charles, a cavalry officer. The time is the 1854 and Charles is enlisted in the Eleventh Hussars of Lord Cardigan, The Light Brigade, but before the history takes its toll, Charles and Robert share two weeks of passion; it's love at first sight, and for them everything seems possible. Actually everything is possible since Robert has enough money to not worry about society, they can live apart from the ton in total happiness. But Charles has to return to his military duty and after some weeks it arrives the sad news that almost all the Light Brigade was killed in a battlefield with the Russian Army.

To Robert is enough a feeble hope when he discovers that some soldiers are confined in a battlefield hospital in Scutari, to face the travel and rescue Charles to certain death. But the man he finds his no more the man he remembers: Charles has been catatonic for weeks and so remains even after Robert takes him back to England. This is probably to part of the book I liked best, how Robert takes care of Charles with so much love, even if actually he knew the man only for two weeks before he left. The trial they face is hard and deeply moving, and I really was wondering if there was an happy ending at the end; at some point I even thought that, in some way, even if Charles never fully recovers, for me it was still a story with an happily ever after, since they were together and Robert was happy to have Charles with him in every way he could: never once Robert regrets to have to take care of Charles.

There is also a lot of sex, more before Charles' illness, but also after: obviously it was a different way to approach sex, at first they are passionate and free, also a bit careless, and then it's a more sad and longing way, but nevertheless romantic, maybe even more than before.

When I first approached this story I was perplexed: how it was possible for the author to concentrate all that events in a novella of only 74 pages? But it's possible, and at the end of the book, I didn't feel like something was missing: I had enough time to care for the characters and enough historical details to like the setting.

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Amazon Kindle: The Officer and the Gentleman
Publisher: Total-E-Bound Publishing (January 26, 2009)

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