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Tom Barber Trilogy #1
Uncle Stephen
A subtle supernatural novel in the style of Forrest Reids great friend and admirer Walter de la Mare. It is the story of Tom Barber, an orphaned boy in search of the mysterious uncle he has never met, and about whom there is a hint of scandal. The story of 'Uncle Stephen' came to Reid in a dream, and the dreamlike evocation of the Ulster countryside in which it is set trembles over the brink into the magical.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1931
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About the author
Forrest Reid
59 books15 followersForrest Reid was an Irish novelist, literary critic and translator. He was, along with Hugh Walpole and J.M. Barrie, a leading pre-war British novelist of boyhood. He is still acclaimed as the greatest of Ulster novelists and was recognised with the award of the 1944 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Young Tom.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 2, 2020
In the historical progress of gay literature Uncle Stephen, published in 1931, holds a distinct place. It's not because of anything overt about its main character - Tom's same-sex attraction is implicitly given - but because of the story's fantastical element, a softly magical thread weaving into Tom's dreams or into events that have a dreamlike quality. What's also interesting is that, by whatever name, the supernatural becomes less prominent in the author's next book in the series, The Retreat; and by the 1944 publication of Young Tom, it has been transmuted into the naturally magical world of boyhood.
This time line is important to Uncle Stephen in a couple of ways.
For one, these motifs mark the transition from 19th-century conceptions of male same-sex sexuality to our modern ones. The author, Forrest Reid, first wrote at a time when no exact word embraced this conception and gay men often called themselves "uranians." Their point of reference was ancient Greece, seen since the Renaissance as a haven for secular, enlightened thought. The appearance of Greek myths, magic, and customs in literature subverted the harsh religious and social norms of the West.
Writers used this paganism to signify same-sex attraction while avoiding detection by mainstream readers. Here, to illustrate, Tom kisses the pagan statue of a naked boy in an access of infatuation, though later he will invite a real boy to do the same. But beyond this physicality and the many allusively sexual moments the writer could not go. So the pagan elements work with what the author does give us to leave no doubt that Tom is gay and knows it. Uncle Stephen, then, gives us perhaps the last instance of a uranian sensibility in fiction.
For another thing, the magical aura conjures a glowing idyll of boyhood. Tom's struggle now isn't so much sexuality as it is puberty. Boyhood ends as a rather profane reality sets in and the world imposes cruel and alien demands. Tom at age 11 had lived in a world as natural as it was beneficent. At 13 he went through puberty in the most explicit evocation of the dream world up to that point. Now, in this final book, Tom at 15 finds himself perplexed. He wants to go forward toward his fate, but at the same time backward to a safe and loving place. It will take magic to pull that off, an alchemy that inherits the natural wonder of childhood.
When the writer E. M. Forster reviewed the book for the News Chronicle he said at one point, "here the reviewer feels inclined to put down his pen. For what follows is too strange and too gentle to be described." That's how I also feel. The prose here, and in all of Reid's works really, has a style and a gentle brilliance to it unlike anything else. This story exudes a moral fragrance, as the preface puts it, though it never moralizes about anything. I recommend Uncle Stephen either by itself or as part of the series.
This time line is important to Uncle Stephen in a couple of ways.
For one, these motifs mark the transition from 19th-century conceptions of male same-sex sexuality to our modern ones. The author, Forrest Reid, first wrote at a time when no exact word embraced this conception and gay men often called themselves "uranians." Their point of reference was ancient Greece, seen since the Renaissance as a haven for secular, enlightened thought. The appearance of Greek myths, magic, and customs in literature subverted the harsh religious and social norms of the West.
Writers used this paganism to signify same-sex attraction while avoiding detection by mainstream readers. Here, to illustrate, Tom kisses the pagan statue of a naked boy in an access of infatuation, though later he will invite a real boy to do the same. But beyond this physicality and the many allusively sexual moments the writer could not go. So the pagan elements work with what the author does give us to leave no doubt that Tom is gay and knows it. Uncle Stephen, then, gives us perhaps the last instance of a uranian sensibility in fiction.
For another thing, the magical aura conjures a glowing idyll of boyhood. Tom's struggle now isn't so much sexuality as it is puberty. Boyhood ends as a rather profane reality sets in and the world imposes cruel and alien demands. Tom at age 11 had lived in a world as natural as it was beneficent. At 13 he went through puberty in the most explicit evocation of the dream world up to that point. Now, in this final book, Tom at 15 finds himself perplexed. He wants to go forward toward his fate, but at the same time backward to a safe and loving place. It will take magic to pull that off, an alchemy that inherits the natural wonder of childhood.
When the writer E. M. Forster reviewed the book for the News Chronicle he said at one point, "here the reviewer feels inclined to put down his pen. For what follows is too strange and too gentle to be described." That's how I also feel. The prose here, and in all of Reid's works really, has a style and a gentle brilliance to it unlike anything else. This story exudes a moral fragrance, as the preface puts it, though it never moralizes about anything. I recommend Uncle Stephen either by itself or as part of the series.
August 5, 2020
Truly remarkable story. The longing for connection is beautifully conveyed. The use of the magical to provide the realization of loss was unexpectedly moving. Reid's descriptive prose of nature pulls you into the world he creates. An amazing book and author.
Want to read
June 12, 2025Read this twenty years ago and it was wonderful but I want to reread it, soon I hope. I will be very surprised if I don't give it five stars.
December 11, 2016
Probably the best of the three books in the trilogy. Though it comes last chronologically, it was written first. Also the most explicitly gay, though sadly much is left unsaid, often to the point of unfathomable ambiguity. The magic realism is also at its strongest, when in the two other books the marvellous could be ascribed to Tom's imagination, in this volume, magic spills over and affects other characters to the point of being undeniable.
January 18, 2022
Beautiful prose with a lot of veiled meanings throughout. Felt like a queer 'The Magician's Nephew'.
July 4, 2023
Just the most beautiful novel.
Stumbled upon this in someone's instagram stories earlier in the year and immediately had to buy matching copies of the trilogy (I went for the 80s GMP editions, but the more recent release from Valancourt are gorgeously designed and include a new introduction, photographs and archival materials.)
The book begins with the funeral of Tom Barber's father. The death has left him to live with his step-family who are inoffensive but ill-suited to look after Tom. He is different from them and stands apart (the exception being the daughter Jane with whom he has midnight rendezvous in his bedroom.)
He decides he must find his mysterious Uncle Stephen (his mother's uncle) who nobody in the family has seen for decades and mention of his name causes murmurs of scandals and magic.
Reid's writing is so clear and fluid it's an absolute joy to read. As nearly every review I've read mentions, he perfectly captures the wonder and capriciousness of youth. His descriptions of nature touch on the sublime and it is all framed with folklore and classicism.
I'm hugely excited to read the second two Tom Barber books, and also will be scouring bookshops for anything else by Forrest Reid.
Stumbled upon this in someone's instagram stories earlier in the year and immediately had to buy matching copies of the trilogy (I went for the 80s GMP editions, but the more recent release from Valancourt are gorgeously designed and include a new introduction, photographs and archival materials.)
The book begins with the funeral of Tom Barber's father. The death has left him to live with his step-family who are inoffensive but ill-suited to look after Tom. He is different from them and stands apart (the exception being the daughter Jane with whom he has midnight rendezvous in his bedroom.)
He decides he must find his mysterious Uncle Stephen (his mother's uncle) who nobody in the family has seen for decades and mention of his name causes murmurs of scandals and magic.
Reid's writing is so clear and fluid it's an absolute joy to read. As nearly every review I've read mentions, he perfectly captures the wonder and capriciousness of youth. His descriptions of nature touch on the sublime and it is all framed with folklore and classicism.
I'm hugely excited to read the second two Tom Barber books, and also will be scouring bookshops for anything else by Forrest Reid.
June 28, 2025
November 2023 (4 stars)
I read this simultaneously with Young Tom, being too impatient to see how the story progressed to wait to finish Young Tom first. It wasn't at all confusing to alternate between the two books – though as I had already read Young Tom so recently the plot of that book was fairly fresh in my memory so I wasn't struggling to juggle and make sense of two separate plots about the same boy in my mind. But I actually think reading both books simultaneously might be the best way of reading them, or certainly an interesting exercise, because there seemed to be so many points of connection. It felt almost natural to be moving from one book to the other, to be noticing parallels in events, or in the order in which events occurred. I would read a few chapters of one, then read a few chapters of the other, then move back to the other again. Some scenarios were repeated almost exactly – like the rat swimming across the river to look at Tom – and it made one wonder if it was deliberate, whether the books were written to follow/repeat a particular pattern, or whether such things were subconscious or unintentional on Reid's part.
Once again I loved Reid's style. He is a beautiful writer. But once again it is not really a happy book. It still leaves the reader tinged with regret at what Tom has lost – a bosom friend of his own age. The future relationship between Tom and Uncle Stephen looks like it is going to be a problematical one morally (from the reader's point of view).
I've read other people's reviews of this book but they seem to see things there which I don't see – or read things into it which I didn't. I don't know if that is because they are more perceptive than me, or because they read editions with introductions which put ideas and interpretations into their head which aren't obvious to the uninitiated like myself. I just enjoyed reading it as a story without wishing to read into it any veiled messages.
Lovely though Reid's style consistently is, only one passage actually jumped out at me from all the rest, three simple lines:
'I love you, Stephen,' Tom whispered.
'You're not to think of that now.'
'How can I help thinking of it when I'm holding your ears.'
October 2024 (5 stars)
See my review of 4th - 6th November 2023. Clearly reading two books simultaneously coloured that review. This time I was reading Uncle Stephen alone, with my impressions of it being influenced only by memories of the other books in the trilogy. Tom is fifteen here, but he often doesn't sound it, or he seems like he must be a very young-looking fifteen year old as it is often stressed that he looks small compared to everyone around him. It sometimes feels like the timings don't really fit in that well with the other two books. Within just a very few years his mother has died, his father has remarried, and his father has died, and yet you are made to feel like he lost his mother in the dim and distant past instead of within the last three years or so.
I'm not sure that I feel entitled to give this book a rating because I feel like I can't rate it objectively. If this had been the only book Forrest Reid ever wrote, it might have been a four-star read, but because I love Reid, and his style, and his other works, and because this book forms part of a larger work which I love, I want to give it a five-star rating.
If I found the ending rather melancholy last time I read it (perhaps influenced by reading it in conjuction with Young Tom?) I didn't experience the same thing this time, and I felt it ended more hopefully and it felt less of a tragedy that the young Stephen had to go away.
Like the first time I read it, exactly the same few sentences stood out, so I will repeat them again:
'I love you, Stephen,' Tom whispered.
'You're not to think of that now.'
'How can I help thinking of it when I'm holding your ears.'
I read this simultaneously with Young Tom, being too impatient to see how the story progressed to wait to finish Young Tom first. It wasn't at all confusing to alternate between the two books – though as I had already read Young Tom so recently the plot of that book was fairly fresh in my memory so I wasn't struggling to juggle and make sense of two separate plots about the same boy in my mind. But I actually think reading both books simultaneously might be the best way of reading them, or certainly an interesting exercise, because there seemed to be so many points of connection. It felt almost natural to be moving from one book to the other, to be noticing parallels in events, or in the order in which events occurred. I would read a few chapters of one, then read a few chapters of the other, then move back to the other again. Some scenarios were repeated almost exactly – like the rat swimming across the river to look at Tom – and it made one wonder if it was deliberate, whether the books were written to follow/repeat a particular pattern, or whether such things were subconscious or unintentional on Reid's part.
Once again I loved Reid's style. He is a beautiful writer. But once again it is not really a happy book. It still leaves the reader tinged with regret at what Tom has lost – a bosom friend of his own age. The future relationship between Tom and Uncle Stephen looks like it is going to be a problematical one morally (from the reader's point of view).
I've read other people's reviews of this book but they seem to see things there which I don't see – or read things into it which I didn't. I don't know if that is because they are more perceptive than me, or because they read editions with introductions which put ideas and interpretations into their head which aren't obvious to the uninitiated like myself. I just enjoyed reading it as a story without wishing to read into it any veiled messages.
Lovely though Reid's style consistently is, only one passage actually jumped out at me from all the rest, three simple lines:
'I love you, Stephen,' Tom whispered.
'You're not to think of that now.'
'How can I help thinking of it when I'm holding your ears.'
October 2024 (5 stars)
See my review of 4th - 6th November 2023. Clearly reading two books simultaneously coloured that review. This time I was reading Uncle Stephen alone, with my impressions of it being influenced only by memories of the other books in the trilogy. Tom is fifteen here, but he often doesn't sound it, or he seems like he must be a very young-looking fifteen year old as it is often stressed that he looks small compared to everyone around him. It sometimes feels like the timings don't really fit in that well with the other two books. Within just a very few years his mother has died, his father has remarried, and his father has died, and yet you are made to feel like he lost his mother in the dim and distant past instead of within the last three years or so.
I'm not sure that I feel entitled to give this book a rating because I feel like I can't rate it objectively. If this had been the only book Forrest Reid ever wrote, it might have been a four-star read, but because I love Reid, and his style, and his other works, and because this book forms part of a larger work which I love, I want to give it a five-star rating.
If I found the ending rather melancholy last time I read it (perhaps influenced by reading it in conjuction with Young Tom?) I didn't experience the same thing this time, and I felt it ended more hopefully and it felt less of a tragedy that the young Stephen had to go away.
Like the first time I read it, exactly the same few sentences stood out, so I will repeat them again:
'I love you, Stephen,' Tom whispered.
'You're not to think of that now.'
'How can I help thinking of it when I'm holding your ears.'
March 9, 2024
Reid, Forrest - Uncle Stephen
Young Tom stares into the fresh opening in the cemetery.
Watches as his father’s casket is lowered, then covered with dirt.
He will now be cared for by his step-family. Father’s second wife and her children.
Practical sorts. Matter-of-fact, middle class conformists.
Tom is a dreamer, a poetic soul given to fancies, and he certainly does not fit in.
Step-family will look after Tom, however, as his previously deceased mother left him a small legacy.
An income of more value than he, perhaps.
One night he dreams of his sole surviving relative, Uncle Stephen, great uncle actually, whom he has never met. No one has ever met him, though there are whispers. Stephen had run away from home, had lived as a vagabond, rumors about the occult.
And off Tom goes, in search of someone who, “… seemed to believe, not exactly in the stories, but in something behind them -- powers, influences, a spiritual world much closer to this world than the remote heaven of Christianity …”
Carefully wrought novel, languid as summer, overflowing with the ecstasy of discovery.
This may appeal to Machen fans, as young Tom seems a younger, more fortunate version of Lucien Taylor.
Young Tom stares into the fresh opening in the cemetery.
Watches as his father’s casket is lowered, then covered with dirt.
He will now be cared for by his step-family. Father’s second wife and her children.
Practical sorts. Matter-of-fact, middle class conformists.
Tom is a dreamer, a poetic soul given to fancies, and he certainly does not fit in.
Step-family will look after Tom, however, as his previously deceased mother left him a small legacy.
An income of more value than he, perhaps.
One night he dreams of his sole surviving relative, Uncle Stephen, great uncle actually, whom he has never met. No one has ever met him, though there are whispers. Stephen had run away from home, had lived as a vagabond, rumors about the occult.
And off Tom goes, in search of someone who, “… seemed to believe, not exactly in the stories, but in something behind them -- powers, influences, a spiritual world much closer to this world than the remote heaven of Christianity …”
Carefully wrought novel, languid as summer, overflowing with the ecstasy of discovery.
This may appeal to Machen fans, as young Tom seems a younger, more fortunate version of Lucien Taylor.
July 14, 2021
"Perhaps it was because the day had altered, and with it the colour of everything; perhaps only because places are always different when you are leaving them." p.239-40
I really enjoyed this book! The prose was beautiful, with a signature turn of the century style which combines the descriptiveness of Victorian prose with the distinctive new voice of Modernism.
The plot revolved around young-teen Tom Barber who after the death of his father decides he doesn't want to stay with his step-mother and step-siblings so runs away to his mysterious Uncle Stephen. The novel real captures the wonder of childhood and the turmoil that comes in the transition into adolescence.
Also I'm always a sucker for any book featuring a dilapidated country house with mysterious secrets and an over grown garden.
I really enjoyed this book! The prose was beautiful, with a signature turn of the century style which combines the descriptiveness of Victorian prose with the distinctive new voice of Modernism.
The plot revolved around young-teen Tom Barber who after the death of his father decides he doesn't want to stay with his step-mother and step-siblings so runs away to his mysterious Uncle Stephen. The novel real captures the wonder of childhood and the turmoil that comes in the transition into adolescence.
Also I'm always a sucker for any book featuring a dilapidated country house with mysterious secrets and an over grown garden.
July 31, 2013
This didn't really work for me. Perhaps I need to read a biography of FR sooner rather than later? What is young Deverell all about? Is he another alter ego? Seems a bit of a waste of a potentially interesting character if so.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews