The Harness Room
Ratings2
Average rating3
15
Ratings2
Average rating3
Colonel Macready thinks his bookish seventeen-year-old son Fergus is too soft, so he enlists the help of his manly chauffeur, Fred Carrington, to help whip the boy into shape. But the sweaty afternoons in the harness room above the garage take a turn the Colonel hadn't foreseen when Fergus and Fred's boxing sessions lead first to friendship, and then to something more . . . L. P. Hartley (1895-1972) is best known for his classics The Go-Between and Eustace and Hilda, as well as his supernatural stories, but The Harness Room (1971), the author's only explicitly gay-themed novel, reveals another side to this important 20th-century English writer. This first-ever reprint of Hartley's scarce novel features a new introduction by Gregory Woods, who writes that The Harness Room 'can be seen as representing a pivotal moment, not only in the career of this significant gay author, but also in the development of gay fiction itself'.
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I gave the harness room by l p Hartley. A 3.5It was his only explicitly gay novel. You still had to read between the lines though. You get glimpses of each character ‘s personality but because it's short you barely know them. I'll read more from hartley because his writing is pleasing to read. It was not a weird book but I still don't know what I read . And what was that ending. I was surprised. It totally came out of nowhere. How will the lives of people look like after the ending
Colonel Macready enlists the help of his manly, masculine chauffeur Fred to help toughen up Fergus, his “bookish” son, who doesn't live up to his own expectations of masculinity and “What it means to be a man”.
Whilst the Colonel is away on his honeymoon, what happens is not quite what Fergus' father originally had in mind, with a lot of what is not said being part of the novella, making it quite erotic at times. The plot ultimately plays out how the internal and external pressures on one's identity can have dire consequences.
Written at a time when attitudes were very different towards the LGBTQIA+ community, the novel reads easily, despite being bogged down by paragraphs that may be more difficult for the modern reader to digest.
It asks and poses many questions that could be good for a book club discussion.
