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reviews_and_ramblings
I usually don't like to much mystery, it's not my genre, but this one is different, I have the feeling that the main character, Michael, more than trying to solve a mystery is trying to find himself, and for a 47 years old man it's probably the time. When Michael was 22 years old, he was the classical good son of an upper class family, English teacher in a private school, already married with a family friend, it seemed a perfect life. But then Ronnie entered the picture, 17 years old and American refugee in Canada, officially to avoid the war in Vietnam. Even if Ronnie was underage he was way more experience than Michael, and Michael didn't know that. To the young boy it took not so much to convince closeted case Michael to leave job, family and respectability and living as a bohemian in a little apartment: sex as food for love was enough. But the fairy tale didn't last, another man entered Ronnie's life, and Michael was soon forgotten, apparently.
25 years later Ronnie is dead, AIDS complications, and Michael is named executor. It's not something he likes, he wasn't so near Ronnie anymore, and I have the feeling that Michael wanted to remember Ronnie as that 17 years old, the boy who still loved him. The man who is now dead is a stranger and looking through his things is like starting to destroy the image of that 17 years old boy to substitute it with the adult Ronnie. To help that destroing process, Michael finds a mummified corpse in a trunk inside Ronnie's apartment, the same apartment the man always lived in and stubbornly refused to leave. Someone could think the reason was that it was difficult to remove a corpse and it was better to stay there near it, instead I think that, like Michael, also Ronnie wanted to remember the time when he was happy, when Michael was there with him, probably the only man he loved and was loved back.
As often happens when I read a novel with a deceased character, who can't speak for himself, I try to imagine what his voice is; I like Ronnie's voice, probably since, despite the fact that Ronnie dumped him and they didn't speak for years, Michael still loves him and can't believe that he is a murder. Since Michael is a good man, there should be a reason if he thinks so highly of Ronnie. Of Ronnie himself we have only some pictures, in different moments of his life and a diary, where he mostly talks of his great love, Michael... what happened to Ronnie to renounce to that love?
This is what wants to know Michael: it's not a question to discover the true to have some sort of justice, most of the people of that time is not more alive, Ronnie is dead, the corpse is obviously dead and no one seems to have missed him in 25 years... To Michael is important to know the truth since, if he mistook to judge Ronnie, he probably mistook all his life. And in the search of the truth he will grow: at first he is still anchored to 25 years before, when he was hardly a man and loved a boy. And so, even if he is now 47 years old, he still loves a boy, Ryan, someone that maybe remembers him Ronnie, a runaway kid without family to back him, someone who needs the comfort and steadiness of a man like Michael. But Michael is no more 22 years old, and as I said, he grows during the story and he grows tired also of Ryan. To excuse him, Ryan is not exactly a saint, and not even a boy in dear need, and so it's no hard blow for the romantic readers. Instead I found way more interested the other two men who gravitate around Michael, Jaym and Logan. Actually I really wondered about Logan, the straight friend, who was like a Jimmy Cricket for Michael, even if he didn't give advice but only borrow a friendly ear.
The story is all about Michael, and I like very much how it wrapped up. I'm still a little sad for Ronnie, but he was already dead when the book started, so there was no hope for him... but he is anyway the strongest voice in the novel, Michael is more the silent type, pondering and doing always the right thing.
http://www.mlrbooks.com/ShowBook.php?book=DQCD0001
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Amazon: Drag Queen in the Court of Death
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