Halfway through his debut novel, Charlie Porter has a character ask the question that still haunts generations of British gay men: “What am I to do with this anger?” The book is Porter’s answer. The starting point is simple. Johnny is 19, and on the run from a small-town childhood; arriving in London, he falls in love with Jerry, who is 45 and HIV positive. Their affair coincides exactly with the last four years in which the virus was untreatable; Jerry dies of an Aids-related illness in the summer of 1995, just months before effective combination therapies began to be prescribed.
Twenty-six years later, Johnny is still living in Jerry’s flat. This is in the Nova Scotia House of the title, an oasis of public housing in one of the last pockets of unredeveloped land in London’s East End. Inevitably, a tower of flats is now being built right next to it. As the tower rises, light is gradually excluded from the garden that Jerry created and which the grief-stricken Johnny has lovingly maintained.
As we overhear his reflections on this act of destruction, we realise that Johnny is in mourning for far more than just his beloved. Now 45 himself, he is one of that specific generation of British gay men who – in his words – “lost everyone. No elders, all dead. The ones that survived are broken.” The ecstasies of his life with Jerry have been replaced by bad buildings, bad manners and bad sex with online hook-ups. However, as the tower rises, creating darkness, memory floods in, bringing new light.
The past that Johnny recalls turns out to be a very specific kind of other country. His lover lived through the heroic days of British Gay Lib; as Jerry describes them, they were the years “when we found ourselves”, when gay culture elevated freedom over possessiveness, community over capitalism, liberty and creativity over everything. As their affair catches fire, Jerry’s courage and grace in the face of adversity teach his young lover that there is a straight line of descent from what Jerry calls the “queer magic” of his heyday to the empathy and activism that the epidemic now demands.
To make his evocation of Aids-era London hit the reader with the same sensory dazzle it once did his young narrator, Porter employs a daring trick. All the benchmarks of early 90s queer London are here, recognisable down to their last filthy and heartbreaking detail: the backrooms, the saunas, the raves, the direct actions. However, none is given its real name or location. This creates a very particular kind of history. As memorialised here in a web of fictional disguises, the lost locations, communities and artists of our recent past are not so much documented as returned to archetypal life.
A similar trick of untethering structures the book’s prose. All information about Johnny beyond his name and age is withheld; we meet him only through his voice. We hear as much as see him getting sloppy with sex, drunk with discovery, fractured by loss; his sustained interior monologue treats full stops as optional, tenses slippery, verbs as a necessary hindrance. The effect is to lend his memories an almost hallucinatory authority. “Why do I go there what more proof do I need what do I want these men to be”: in this unstoppable flow of words, the past is made present, and the death of his beloved undone.
When the light on his garden is finally gone, Johnny decides he must leave Nova Scotia House. Porter spurs him to do this via two powerfully stage-managed epiphanies. The first occurs at an Aids-themed art exhibit in New York, for which Porter borrows the work of Félix González-Torres; the second is at a London exhibition of panels from the UK version of the Aids memorial quilt. Prompted by these acts of witness, Johnny decides that his life’s task will be to honour not just his lover’s memory but his radical vision. As he starts a new life outside London, Porter offers the reader a utopian glimpse of pre-Aids queer culture being born again, and of anger and grief turning into possibility.
According to the book’s artfully buried chronology, Johnny was born in the same year as his creator. Porter’s first novel has all the virtues of exactly the kind of queer life that he is using his fictional alter ego to celebrate. It invites the reader to join him in an exhilarating, risk-taking, life-affirming experiment.
• Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter is published by Particular (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
