Gorged on misery and heavy morals.’ Should they publish and be damned, or wait for a more opportune moment? Crewe brilliantly evokes the stifling atmosphere of hypocrisy, shame and hopelessness that presses in, as well as the sickening self-preservation they are forced to consider: ‘He wished he belonged to the common herd, nuzzling in easy ignorance.
‘The country has choked itself on ill-feeling. I adored Tom Crewes The New Life so much that we made it the lead review in my first week at the ST. Just as the book is going to press, Oscar Wilde is arrested, and the national mood sours. Bravely, they resolve to write a book, certain that if the arguments are sound and the suppositions good, then the ‘wheels of progress will turn’. Life under the current laws is impossible: it is time for change.
They are respected writers and family men, but each is burdened by an unacceptable private life: Addington has brought a young man to live in his home Ellis’s wife has moved away to be with another woman. The New Life, Tom Crewe’s superb debut novel, is set in fin-de-siècle London and follows Addington and his co-author Henry Ellis (based on John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis) as they try to make a rational argument for ‘the impossible subject’. But once you are used to it, it is a little like reading about Ireland, or socialism.’ This is the accepting, if unfeeling, response of John Addington’s undergraduate daughter after reading his recently completed book on homosexuality. John, one of the protagonists of Tom Crewe’s novel, The New Life, is a gay man living in mid-1890s England, married to a woman, suffocating under the weight of the unhappy life he’s. The New Life is the 2023 debut novel of British writer Tom Crewe.
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