Alec

It is easy to pass over this humble cover art, but you shouldn’t. This is the story of EM Forster’s Maurice from the point of view of the gamekeeper, Alec Scudder. This story starts long before Maurice, with Alec’s childhood, and continues on beyond Maurice, beyond the horrors of WW1, to the years beyond. It was written with the blessing of the Forster estate. It truly lives up to its predecessor and arguably is even better. I enjoyed reading Maurice – but for anyone familiar with history, the end of Maurice is problematic. Two gay men going off into the woods in 1914 leaves a big unknown with Great Britain plunged into the war that year. So Alec continues this story. And this novel does so with details of time and place and dialects… this is a piece of literature, beautifully written and gripping in its storytelling. Perhaps one of the best books I have read in recent years.

* * * * *

William di Canzio’s Alec, inspired by Maurice, E. M. Forster’s secret novel of a happy same-sex love affair, tells the story of Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper Maurice Hall falls in love with in Forster’s classic, published only after the author’s death.

Di Canzio follows their story past the end of Maurice to the front lines of battle in World War I and beyond. Forster, who tried to write an epilogue about the future of his characters, was stymied by the radical change that the Great War brought to their world. With the hindsight of a century, di Canzio imagines a future for them and a past for Alec―a young villager possessed of remarkable passion and self-knowledge.

Alec continues Forster’s project of telling stories that are part of “a great unrecorded history.” Di Canzio’s debut novel is a love story of epic proportions, at once classic and boldly new.

The Purple Fantastic Steam Meter gives this a soft 3. This is an extraordinary bit of writing, there is a little steam but it is a minor part of this epic story.

More about The Purple Fantastic Steam Meter on the About page.