Review of John Boyne's The Weight of Angels – What If Oscar Wilde Had Lived?

The great Irish writer died a broken man, alone, at the age of 46. Imagining a second act for him is a very appealing idea, but its outcome is sentimental and unconvincing. In 1895, four days after the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest, the Marquess of Queensberry left a calling card at Oscar Wilde's club, publicly accusing him of posing as a sodomite. Instead of filing a libel suit, which only five years later led to his imprisonment and early death in a hotel in Paris

In 1895, four days after The Importance of Being Earnest opened, the Marquess of Queensberry left a card at Oscar Wilde's club publicly accusing him of "representing himself as a sleeper." What would have happened just five years later if Wilde had simply torn up that card, instead of filing the libel suit that led to his imprisonment and untimely death in a Paris hotel? John Boyne's new novel seeks to answer this intriguing question.

For starters, Bowen plots the fate of Wilde's beloved Lord Alfred Douglas, amusingly retelling the details of Wilde's real life before, during and after his time in Reading Prison. This game of cat and mouse sets the novel with history being reimagined. Wilde herself, conveniently freed from her marriage by the early death of her husband, is free to live not as a tortured, scandalized genius, but as a sane, sane, party-loving queen. On the plus side, the Oscars can trade for a crowded list of famous actors. On the downside, he shows little sign of the troubled, radical mind that produced Wilde's later journalism and fiction, never mind the subversive linguistic conflagrations of The Importance.

The storyline jumps around nicely over the years, often abandoning high society comedy to show that this Wilde replacement is involved in more than his fair share of melodrama. This allows for some very effective tearjerkers, especially in the scene where he re-imagines the departure of his beloved eldest son to Somme. Time jumps come in the form of letters, newspaper articles, and even scripts for fictional plays and movies about Wilde. This genre hopping keeps things lively and allows Boyne to make some very effective shifts in tone, time and place.

Bowen's double quotation marks do not so much indicate that his fictional Wilde is interacting with queer history as magically cancel it out.

The real Wilde did not write another play after The Importance of Being Earnest. Bowen's version lives on to write nine more films, plus a Hollywood screenplay. Unfortunately, we do not read a single quote from them. Strangely, Bowen goes out of his way to make these plays look boring. He transforms his imaginary alternative into the conservatism of the austere aesthete who thinks only of success. We see the rewards of his writing (endless money, a knight) but never the process or motivations. In fact, we never see him as a writer.

Given Wilde's queerness—which Boyne clearly intends to be his novel's main claim to seriousness—the narrative finds him encountering several of the most important early European theorists of what we now call gay liberation: George Cecil Ives, Magnus Hirschfeld, Andre Gide. However, it leaves Wilde untouched by their ideas and keeps him away from any experience of the relevant gay subcultures in London, Berlin and Paris. Instead, Wilde stays in the closet and settles into a Mayfair mansion with a comfortable schoolteacher. After a decade of monogamy, Oscar destroys this happy home with the help of a stubborn football student. As a direct consequence of this error, the deadly consequences of homosexual shame and hatred invade the novel for the first time. Wilde quickly comes to his senses and decides that he really should use his position as a national literary treasure to do something to make the world a better place for gay people.

From then on—around 1930—Boyen not so much presents his imaginary Wilde interacting with queer history as magically cancels it. At another party, Winston Churchill is enlisted to promote gay rights in Parliament. The characters are helpfully psychotic, imagining 1970s-style gay liberation marches, gay marriage, and even some very specific post-Stonewall debates about the merits of radical, assimilationist theories of gay liberation. Boyne Wild clearly sides with the latter. In a voice that at times sounds suspiciously like Boyne's, Wilde gives a speech that not only allows her to publicly defend feminism and Irish independence, but also to single-handedly convince MPs to vote for the full and overnight decriminalization of homosexuality. Fortunately, all this sentimental nonsense happened just in time for the 1952 coronation, which meant that Prince Philip and Elizabeth II could congratulate Wilde on his efforts during their party. Unsurprisingly, Wilde died of happiness and went straight to heaven.

Any historical fantasy worth its salt must play with its reader, constantly asking them to evaluate the validity or desirability of imagined options. In this case, in a year when attacks on queer and trans lives have increased, Bowen's decision to replace the real history of that community's collective struggle with such a fake, top-down miracle seems like a very strange fictional maneuver indeed. He's clearly done a lot of research, but he's chosen to put it in the service of a wild creation that's fatally less interesting and moving than the original. In this version of history, Ireland's greatest master of the language is reduced to a sentimental, royalist-loving, champagne-drinking showman. What a waste of a great idea.

The Weight of Angels by John Bowen is published by Doubleday (£20). To support The Guardian, order your copy. Delivery charges may apply.