Fairyland: A Novel - Hardcover

Elliott, Sumner Locke

3.97

90 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006016221X ISBN 13: 9780060162214

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1990

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Growing up in pre-1950 Sydney, Seaton Daly accepts his gay identity but never finds love until his emigration to America as a successful writer compels a confrontation with his self-doubt, bringing him closer to finding true love

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About the Author:

Sumner Locke Elliott was born in Sydney in 1917. His mother died the day after his birth, and the boy was raised by his aunts.

Elliott wrote his first play when he was twelve, and while he was still at school joined Sydney’s Independent Theatre. In 1942 he was drafted and served out much of the war as a typist in remote parts of Australia. But he was besotted with the theatre and with play writing. He found success after the war with plays including Rusty Bugles and Invisible Circus.

Elliott went to the United States in 1948. Three years later his play Buy Me Blue Ribbons premiered on Broadway. He launched a prominent career writing plays for the television networks, and based himself in New York. He became an American citizen in 1955 and did not visit Australia again until 1974.

Careful, He Might Hear You was Elliott’s debut novel. It won Australia's highest literary honour, the Miles Franklin Award, in 1963, was translated into a number of languages and became an international bestseller. In 1983 it was made into an outstanding film directed by Carl Schultz, starring Wendy Hughes, Robyn Nevin and Nicholas Gledhill.

Elliott wrote ten novels in all. He won the Patrick White Literary Award in 1977. After a lifetime of concealing his homosexuality, he spent his final years living with his partner Whitfield Cook. Sumner Locke Elliott died in New York City in 1991.
Dennis Altman is a professorial fellow in human security at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. His publications include the groundbreaking Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1972) and, more recently, Gore Vidal’s America and 51st State? His latest book is The End of the Homosexual?

From Publishers Weekly:

Growing up gay in Sydney, Australia, on the eve of WW II is the subject of this mannered novel, Elliott's ninth ( Edens Lost ; Waiting for Childhood ), which ranges from tender lyricism to grotesque satire. Son of an aloof mother who idolized his dead hero father, Seaton Daly is orphaned young. Seduced by another schoolboy, Seaton moves from one tremulous, unsuccessful affair to the next. Structurally the novel focuses on a gallery of men for whom Seaton yearns: Byron the narcissistic actor; baby-faced Milly Dick in a pink apron, offering to share his horsey wife; the authoritarian Captain Smollett; the nameless tough who lures gays only to brutalize them. Having created the juvenile radio series Fairyfish , Seaton eventually visits America as a playwright--a phase that the story hastily skims. He is a character fixed at a level of naive sensitivity in a gay world delineated as treacherous and transient. The novel's stronger segments include celebrations of male identity in enclaves like the Marble Bar and Gomorrah, a subway men's room. The explosive denouement seems arbitrary and unheralded.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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