The Boy in the Rain by Stephanie Cowell
What's It About?
It is 1903 in the English countryside when Robbie, a shy young art student, meets the twenty-nine-year-old Anton who is running from memories of his brutal childhood and failed marriage. Within months, they begin a love affair that will never let them go. As their commitment to each other grows, the world about them turns to a more dangerous place.Stephanie Cowell’s The Boy in the Rain (Regal House Publishing) is a love story of the highest order, so powerful for advancing important issues from a historical perspective in Edwardian England, but more significantly for vividly and elegantly capturing the passion, beauty and despair of a forbidden (at the time) affair between two men.
“We must pretend every moment we’re not what we are.”
The Gross Decency Laws were created in England in 1885, sending men to prison for two years for the then-crime of homosexuality. Up until its repeal in 1967, more than 50,000 men were said to be sentenced to prison over 82 years.
That regulation casts a pallor over this tale in the early 1900s in and around the English countryside as well as London proper — although the intricate machinations and emotions of the relationship are so intensely described as to make the laws easy to overlook.
Gripping Love Story
Robbie, a young aspiring artist, is sent from his small manufacturing town to Nottinghamshire to be tutored in all academic disciplines by the vicar, George Langstaff. While under his guise, he discovers on the property a neighboring farmhouse seemingly occupied by another young man, Antonio, from a family of means (but with baggage) who has done well in the banking trade but would prefer to advance his socialist beliefs to elevate the status of the poor working class.
The two enter a torrid romance, described by Cowell in magnificent detail, from their transition of intricate dialogue to physical discovery. The writing is exquisite, capturing their every feeling and breath. And it continues as both Robbie and Antonio alternately stray, always fumbling as one or the other needs to pursue another direction, either professionally or with a new partner, be it man, woman or Antonio’s former wife Louise. Can they ever get on the same page at the same time?
The on-again, off-again carousel is all too familiar in the game of love, and Cowell writes as if we are right there with her protagonists, experiencing their emotions and easily relating them to something in our own pasts.
And Cowell engages readers with the setting as a character in its own right, taking us into the scents of the English countryside, the cozy fires, the paths and the forests, and then showing us London from the upper-class parties and comforts to the Charing Cross taverns where filthy fates await.
Love Facing Uncertainty
How is this love affair going to play out, in the shadows of the crusade for the labor movement and sexuality laws with dangerous consequences? When the effects of a simple kiss are extinguished merely by the presence of an unassuming elderly couple passing by. When people have to cover up who they truly are for fear of being scoffed away to hard labor.
Stephanie Cowell has delivered a wonderful work, bringing into focus some key political and sexual issues of the time, from the backrooms of strategy to the stench of prostitution, while bringing readers as close as the written word is able into the soul of a loving, gripping relationship, the outcome of which is filled with uncertainty.
For a book that makes one feel a spectrum of sensations, that challenges the mind, that creates characters as real as fiction can be, and shows us the great joy and intoxication of astute and descriptive writing, The Boy in the Rain checks all the boxes.
About Stephanie Cowell:
Stephanie Cowell was born in New York City to a family of artists and still lives there — in the same apartment for 47 years. Her heart is half in England/Europe where she has family and considers herself an emotional citizen there. She fell in love with historical fiction at an early age. She began printing stories in a black and white school notebook at about nine years old and in her teens wrote several short novels. Then she left writing for classical singing, appearing in many operas and as an international balladeer. Now she sings mostly while washing the dishes.
Her first published novel was Nicholas Cooke: Actor, Soldier, Physician, Priest, followed by two other Elizabethan-17th century novels: The Physician of London (American Book Award 1996) and The Players: A Novel Of The Young Shakespeare. In 2004, she returned to my musical background and wrote Marrying Mozart. Looking back on her novels so far, she has found she often returns to the passions and struggles as well as the intimate daily world of artists, writers and musicians of the past.
