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Hallelujah now
This novel is in three integrated parts - a contemporary gay classic and tragic tale of Catholic gloom and sexual guilt.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 28, 2019
2nd time around: I first read this years ago and was impressed.
How memory plays tricks! I remember a certain bleakness but this is the sort that sucks the life out of the soul.
Rob/Robbie is a working class scouser, the youngest of a large litter and the only gay ( massive misnomer!) in the family unit. This is now a period piece, I hope. Robbie is closeted with his guilty sinful secret and he has zilch self esteem. He drifts into the S/M zone – he’s a natural M!
Historical fiction it might now be but it's also culturally important –how gay boys met then through personal ads, inviting replies and photos to box numbers. The success/rejection conveyed by the Royal Mail.
Robbie’s closet relationships are sad; usually at night whilst his elderly mum is asleep. He creeps out in his leather gear towards a club or a cottage. Terence Davies will sprinkle quotations throughout the novel, often biblical and usually from the Old Testament. Thus, with the cottage in mind he quotes:
“I will rise now and go about the city in the streets and in the broadways. I will seek him whom my soul loveth. I sought him but I found him not.”
And, in the cottage ruminating on the Agents provocateurs:
“The watchmen that go about the city – all had swords, being expert in war, every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night.”
I said the tone of the novel was bleak. The crescendo of bleakness in Robbie’s life is reached when, as an older man, he becomes hospitalised - in Poplar Ward. Poplar is very special:
“Nothing happens in Poplar except death.
There is no future here, only history…..For Poplar is the end of the road, the final watershed.”
I had forgotten that it was written by Terence Davies the Film Director. It reads throughout like a series of Director’s notes for the various scenes in a film. Was this ever made into a film I wonder? Would I see it if so? Yes, probably – and then treat myself to a stiff drink afterwards! But it's definitely worth reading.
3* this time (4* last time).
How memory plays tricks! I remember a certain bleakness but this is the sort that sucks the life out of the soul.
Rob/Robbie is a working class scouser, the youngest of a large litter and the only gay ( massive misnomer!) in the family unit. This is now a period piece, I hope. Robbie is closeted with his guilty sinful secret and he has zilch self esteem. He drifts into the S/M zone – he’s a natural M!
Historical fiction it might now be but it's also culturally important –how gay boys met then through personal ads, inviting replies and photos to box numbers. The success/rejection conveyed by the Royal Mail.
Robbie’s closet relationships are sad; usually at night whilst his elderly mum is asleep. He creeps out in his leather gear towards a club or a cottage. Terence Davies will sprinkle quotations throughout the novel, often biblical and usually from the Old Testament. Thus, with the cottage in mind he quotes:
“I will rise now and go about the city in the streets and in the broadways. I will seek him whom my soul loveth. I sought him but I found him not.”
And, in the cottage ruminating on the Agents provocateurs:
“The watchmen that go about the city – all had swords, being expert in war, every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night.”
I said the tone of the novel was bleak. The crescendo of bleakness in Robbie’s life is reached when, as an older man, he becomes hospitalised - in Poplar Ward. Poplar is very special:
“Nothing happens in Poplar except death.
There is no future here, only history…..For Poplar is the end of the road, the final watershed.”
I had forgotten that it was written by Terence Davies the Film Director. It reads throughout like a series of Director’s notes for the various scenes in a film. Was this ever made into a film I wonder? Would I see it if so? Yes, probably – and then treat myself to a stiff drink afterwards! But it's definitely worth reading.
3* this time (4* last time).
June 7, 2023
Terence Davies is not as gifted a novelist as he is a filmmaker, but for those who want to burrow deeper into his personal and aesthetic history, this novel is crucial. It’s essentially a novelization and even more brutally detailed expansion of his original agonized semi-autobiographical film trilogy, although there are ample moments in here that directly anticipate scenes and sequences in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. Indeed, in the second part’s Dantean plunge into the gay S&M demimonde—by far the novel’s strongest and most hauntingly revealing section—there’s more than a shade, in its withering epistolary chronicle of Davies’/Robert’s many failed affairs, of his most recent film, Benediction. Extremely chilling how static Davies’ inner pain has evidently remained over so many decades.
June 18, 2024
I cannot imagine a more perfect book.
December 16, 2025
written around the same time as the trilogy and resembling it in form and content though going several layers deeper, essentially the rich interiority of the trilogy's cold exteriority. essential. like any davies work it is a fractured mosaic of overfelt moments.
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December 6, 2025Genuinely a top 5 contender for the most harrowing things I’ve ever read… however awkward or revelatory (and there’s plenty of both) Davies’ translation of his filmmaking style to the novel form can be, the profound, aching sadness at the core of his work has arguably never been so bitterly cold. Probably going to haunt me forever.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews