Mary Renault's 'The Charioteer'

I’ve long thought writing was vital to bring my life back in balance. Surely it sets me to rights, but it occurs to me now that reading can do a similar job.
I picked up Mary Renault’s The Charioteer in a Plymouth fleastore on Saturday, and it was the reading I had with me at the ballet that night (Birmingham Royal Ballet’s jolly Sylvia) with its two long intervals. By the third act I was hooked. Sunday night saw me tuck back into it, and then the book became bedtime reading. On a delayed train, my term’s teaching behind me, I’m free to read for the pleasure of it rather than to teach or assess. I’ve just finished the novel, and collected it inside me.
The Charioteer was published in 1959, and tells a gay love story between men injured at Dunkirk. Set in England, Mary Renault wrote it from the distance of South Africa. I was speaking with the novelist Francis King recently about the situation faced by gay English novelists in the 1950s, many of whom wrote from abroad. It wasn’t just homosexuality that was taboo; sex was. A printer had caused a scene to be excised from one of his novels in which a man’s tongue entered a woman’s mouth, for the printer was liable to be sued for obscene libel for allowing such a thing from his presses.
So the most passionate kiss in The Charioteer is a straight one (and tongues don’t enter mouths). The one gay kiss is very chaste, and sex happens within the line breaks. It’s a wonderful, deep, true book though, not shy of incident and stoked by the intelligence of raw emotions finding ways to settle.
Reading this novel perhaps met the needs writing meets for me, because it achieves much of what I am striving for in my work of late. Honesty without sensation is part of that; writing that gathers pace through a series of long sentences rather than a sequence of stabbing short ones; work that has the strength to linger in the moment for those deeper revelations surface hides; characters who are mature, discovering ways to meet others’ needs while startled by their own.