Out of Bounds

by Mike Seabrook

Book by Seabrook, Mike

Genres: Gay

304 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 1992

Reviews

[Aricia Gavriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summer was coming on in Aus when I wrote the original of this review a decade ago; and with the cricket on the tv and a whole cricket season in front of us, I had a hankering to read a gay cricket novel. A what?! You think no such thing exists? Luckily, you're wrong! OUT OF BOUNDS is a nice afternoon read for summer, north or south of the equator.

There's just enough cricket to make it a 'cricket novel' without the book getting so 'crickety' that a footy fan couldn't read it (or an American??). The story is also angsy ... quite rich with the paranoia about getting "found out" being gay. It was written back in the 1990s, and the edition I have is the GMP issue, which has a rather nice cover.

Some readers are going to have a problem with this book because it features a school teacher of 29, and a kid just turning 18 who's fallen in love with him. Personally, I don't see a problem. At 17 or 18, people are driving cars, getting snockered, getting married, making babies, going to war and using machine guns, committing felonies, getting tried as adults, and being banged up in prison. 'Scuse me, but what's so outrageous about a guy turning 18 having a proper love life?

And, assuming you don't believe people should be forced into celibacy till age 21 ... and/or that it's morally bankrupt for a late-teen to fall for a young man of 29, there's nothing else in OUT OF BOUNDS to grate on your nerves. (If you have a problem with a teen falling for a guy of 29 ... what about the 14 year olds who drooled over Han Solo? Harrison Ford was 34 when the first movie was filmed in 1976. The wicket gets a bit sticky around here!)

OUT OF BOUNDS is about the relationship between a kid from a home controlled by religious whack-jobs, and a teacher at his school. Cricket is their common ground at first; when they fall in mutual lust, they discover they have a whole lot more in common. Then there's trouble with the school, and a blackmailer -- the kid's parents turn out to be Christian above and beyond the call of intelligence, much less duty ... complete morons.

The novel is very romantic and not at all sexy, so if you're looking for something that's strong on plot and sort of skirts around the tricky issue of gay sex on paper, this is a good book to start with. (Personally, I could've stood a lot more graphic treatment of the love scenes, but on the other hand the book is delightfully romantic, and author Seabrook definitely wrote what he intended to write. His love scenes are the kind you find in those romance novels where the characters slide into each other's arms, their lips meet, then there's three dots, two blank lines, and the next scene starts. Writer's prerogative. Seabrook could have jazzed it up more, but, there you go. That's just me.)

If I had any kind of problem with OUT OF BOUNDS, it's the resolution ... and again, this is totally subjective. The characters basically run away from the problem of getting caught being gay. They go to Paris -- fair enough. The French make a heck of a lot more sense on subjects like the Age of Consent, and being gay in general. But then you have this highly intelligent young man who's going to go to Paris to be a "boytoy." I don't say it doesn't happen! It does. But ... I have a slight problem with an intelligent guy letting his education go, not building a career, his own life, so forth.

(Why? Well, because this life choice comes back to bite you on the posterior when you're 35 or 40 ... about the time middle age sets in, your looks are past their use-by date, maybe you're divorced or widowed ... suddenly you have to get a job, and you can't, because you're unqualified for anything. Life is like that. It bites, if you don't stop it.)

But one could also accept OUT OF BOUNDS as a kind of fantasy in which the two handsome princes escape to the magical kingdom and live happily ever after. And if you like cricket (I do), there's a lot in this novel for you.

AG's rating: 3.5 stars out of five, rounded up to 4 and recommended.

[Martyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

For about the first half of the book I was enjoying it. It's quite slow paced, slow to read, long-winded, but I didn't mind that. But then for much of the second half of the book I just found it too long-winded, the characters too irritating, some of the characters too implausible, the dialogue ridiculous - melodramatic or unnatural, people's behaviour irrational, and it just felt like it needed the work of a good editor to strike out everything that was superfluous to requirements and tighten up the rest of it to bring it back to where it should have been. It was impossible to imagine what the supposedly gorgeously handsome Andrew Tyldesley looked like when his speech made him sound like a psychopathic drag queen. Stephen's parents were similarly turned into nutcases. And a lot of things just didn't add up or sounds particularly credible. It felt like there were too many plot holes. This is only my second Seabrook novel. I liked the first and was hoping for good things from this next one but was disappointed. But in both instances he manages to create rather unlikeable youthful male leads (compulsive liars and cheats) so that they never fully have your sympathies, and often only have your contempt. For the first half of the novel I was thinking it was four stars, then it dropped to two stars, but the slightly heart-warming ending raised it to three stars. But maybe the sequel will cause me to sway my judgment on the first volume - up or down - according to how the story progresses and finally concludes. Seabrook had some good qualities as a writer, but he just needed a good editor to tighten things up. It feels like he just sat down and wrote dialogue as the passion took him, and then never went back to revise what he had written, to cut out all the repetition or to find all the inconsistencies, and to discover how stupid and unrealistic and unnatural a lot of it all sounded.