janecarnall's Journal

Yuletide: Far from all intentional ill-doing
This year, as in all years since 2003, I drew a book fandom: The Charioteer, by Mary Renault.

This year, though, I had embraced my bookishness: I had offered to write in all fandoms where I'd read the canon so many times I couldn't remember how many.

I think I first encountered Mary Renault in The Persian Boy, though it might have been The Mask of Apollo. (Nicola Marlow first recommended that to my attention.) This was when I was 15 or 16 - before I came out, anyway - and I didn't read The Charioteer until some time after I came out: 17 or 18. I picked it up first about the same time as The Persian Boy, and was put off by the opening chapter, which is Laurie as a small boy. Sometime after I came out I discovered it was well thought of as a gay novel. I got it out of the library.

Then I found my parents had a copy - I think probably because one of the central characters, Andrew, is a Quaker, a conscientious objector - the main part of the novel is set in 1940, just after Dunkirk. (My parents are Friends, and I was brought up a Quaker, though mostly I only go to Meeting now for weddings/funerals.) That was an elderly paperback, with "three men caught up in the struggle of their forbidden love" or somesuch blurbed on the cover. I read that paperback to death. The copy I now own I bought sometime before 1992. (I know this, because I remember reading it around the time of my Finals and figuring out that the first time I read it I was younger than Andrew, and now I was the same age as Ralph.)

But the story I was asked for wasn't to be about Laurie, or Andrew, or Ralph: it was to be about Alec, who first appears mid-way through the book, the host of a queer party, a close friend and former lover of Ralph's, a medical student (he says he's taking his finals that year, but he appears to be working as a houseman - intern, if you're American - because the nurses refer to him without qualification as a doctor). The title of the story, and the sub-titles, are from the classical version of the Hippocratic Oath.

( about the story )

Far From All Intentional Misdoing.

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