Moving day, 1907, a half-furnished house on Berkeley Square. A schoolteacher called Augustus Boone hands the most celebrated wit in England a mop, a bucket and a tin of scouring powder, points him at the kitchen, and goes upstairs to make up the housekeeper’s room. Three hours later Oscar Wilde is on his knees at the skirting boards. It is the funniest scene in The Weight of Angels by John Boyne, and it is also the whole book in miniature: the one person on earth who treats this man as a man rather than a monument, and Wilde astonished, delighted, doing as he is told.
The Premise, Briefly
In February 1895 Wilde is handed a card at his club bearing a misspelled accusation from the father of his lover. Everyone tells him to sue. He declines, destroys it, and loses the lover.
The trial, the hard labour and the ruin all happen, but to Lord Alfred Douglas instead, and Wilde lives to ninety-eight. That substitution hands Boyne a reshuffled literary century in which the prison poem carries a different author on its title page and Wilde spends twenty years trying to get it into print.
Readers who come for the cleverness will find the first two hundred pages generous with it. Those pages are also the weakest, because cleverness is not what The Weight of Angels by John Boyne turns out to be for.
What The Weight of Angels Is Really About
Gus Boone is the invention the book stands on: a Peckham man, a teacher of eleven-year-olds, the son of a bus driver, up at six for an hour’s walking and a set of calisthenics. He wants kisses and the chocolate biscuits with hazelnuts in them, and nothing else. He puts Wilde on fruit for breakfast, rations him to two bottles of champagne a day, and marches him into the street twice daily to walk off the rest.
They share the house for seventeen years, tell the workmen nothing, and nobody calls the police. Wilde, happy for the first time in his life, promptly stops being able to write, which the novel treats as a joke and then as a tragedy, because in 1917 he resolves it in the worst available way. He takes up with a beautiful, talentless nineteen-year-old actor. The affair runs four years across two continents and ends on that same kitchen floor, with Gus in the doorway, hearing everything.
What follows is the part of The Weight of Angels by John Boyne that a group will not shake off. Gus walks out, drinks, and chooses a house in Soho that the police raid that night. Under the law as it then stood, the decent man goes to prison for thirty months and the man who betrayed him goes home and keeps his knighthood, because nobody ever came for Oscar Wilde.
The Charge Yeats Brings
The hinge of The Weight of Angels by John Boyne is an argument on O’Connell Bridge in 1917, a year after the Rising.
Yeats, a friend of thirty years, loses his temper and lays out the case. Wilde promised Emmeline Pankhurst his voice and sent a cheque instead. He wrote a play with two women in love at its heart and rewrote them straight rather than lose the licence. He lives openly with a man and has never spoken for the thousands who cannot. And now, with the leaders of the Rising shot without trial in the city of his birth, he says nothing, while privately hoping the king will knight him.
Boyne gives Wilde no answer to it. For the only time in the book, the most quoted man in England cannot find a line and swears at his friend instead. Everything after, including one very late act of public courage, is Wilde earning a reply.
Where The Weight of Angels Asks Too Much
Four reservations about The Weight of Angels by John Boyne, and a group will divide on the last one.
- The Woolfs are a sketch act. Virginia and Leonard get a long scene of missing tea, four peaches, a Shakespeare quoting game and a door shut in a guest’s face. Extremely funny, and from a different novel.
- Churchill is given the moral high ground and never tested on it. He champions reform, supplies the strategy, takes the best lines, and receives none of the scrutiny the book turns on Yeats or on Wilde himself.
- The women are superb one note at a time. Constance dies in a subordinate clause. The housekeeper is a scold, the secretary is competence, the society friend is gossip, and none is allowed a second register.
- The young actor is the old lover again. Beautiful, vain, talentless, demanding, cruel. The novel says so out loud, twice, which admits the repetition without solving it.
For the Group
Lead with the betrayal, because nothing else in The Weight of Angels by John Boyne will produce a better hour. Wilde is sixty-two when the affair begins, and had been faithful for eleven years. Ask the room what he was buying. Then the harder version: the novel sits entirely inside his head and is sympathetic to him. Does a group want it to be?
Then the Paris lunch of 1921, the bravest scene Boyne has written. A celebrated novelist sits at a cafe table with a fourteen-year-old boy bought from a family in North Africa and defends the arrangement at length, charmingly, in the Socratic manner. Gus is the only person present who calls it obscene. Wilde defends his friend, using the very speech that once made a hero of him. Ask whether the novel is indicting Wilde there or excusing him. Readers will not agree.
Then the ending, which is the test of The Weight of Angels by John Boyne. Boyne grants his protagonist the political victory history withheld for another generation: a single evening’s oratory, a workable majority, and no sign of a campaign or a committee stage. Some will find it the most moving thing they read this year; others will call it wish fulfilment dressed as a third act. Both are defensible, and the argument is the point.
And then, if the group can take it, the deathbed scene in which a father confesses that he sat for twenty-five years on his son’s last message, because passing it on would have eased a guilt he wanted left in place. The quietest cruelty in the book, and the one most readers will recognise.
Content notes: a hanging, and the corpse on a slab. Hard labour, and a man describing what guards let other inmates do to him in his cell. A borstal visit to a prostituted boy of sixteen, birched, used nightly, and not drawn to men. A Black teenager beaten until he cut his own throat. A long, unrefuted defence of paedophilia by a real historical figure with a child at the table. A son lost in the Great War. Slurs for gay men in quantity. Book burnings, a Gestapo list, the 1918 influenza. Cancer. Adultery. Drinking throughout.
More for the group: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is the companion read, a far shorter Irish book on the cost of saying nothing. When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman suits a group drawn to novels built around a real life. Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann works if a famous man seen from close range is the draw. And Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden is the pick if the long union is the thread you want.
Final Thoughts
Four newspapers report the same afternoon in 1949, when a man of ninety-four tells a provincial literary festival the truth about his life. One prints it plainly. One declines to name the dead man out of respect. One demands his prosecution and the return of his prizes. One invents a story about schoolchildren, kills the wrong character and calls for him to be deported. Boyne sets the four side by side, and the effect is better than any commentary.
That sequence is why The Weight of Angels by John Boyne survives its own length and its own guest list. It is far too long, besotted with famous people, and the ending gives its hero more than the century gave anyone. But it is also a serious book about a man with the loudest voice in England who spent sixty years finding reasons not to raise it, and about the one person who loved him enough to make him happy and paid for it. Bring it to a group with four weeks and an appetite for an argument.