The Ring by Richard Chopping (Bantam Books, 1970)
I came across this book on my bookshelf while packing up for my move, and didn’t remember when or how I happened to come by it. Perhaps it was mentioned in one of the book I have about lost gay novels? In any case, it looked interesting, so I decided to read it. The edition I read was a Bantam mass market paperback published in 1970. It was originally published in the U.K. by Secker & Warburg in 1967 (pictured; cover design by the author).
This is the sad story of Boyde, an upper-class, young (30s?) British man who lives with his decaying mother in a decaying house in London. Boyde has a bachelor flat in the basement; his mother, who rarely leaves her bed which is strewn with jewels given to her by her many past glamorous lovers, lives, with her devoted servant, on the upper floors. Boyde is homosexual and cruises a louche gay piano bar and faux-Roman bath filled with men purportedly seeking to lose weight but who are mostly looking for something else entirely. He falls for a straight(ish) masseur named Tex, and simultaneously pursues a catastrophic romance with a beautiful young lad with a snake tattooed around his entire body. Boyde also has a gay friend who is even more pathetic and sex-starved then he, and their affection for one another is laced with mutual disdain.
The story of Boyde’s demise (he ends up dead of course, killed in the baths when he comes on to the wrong straight man), is juxtaposed with two alternative narratives: one chronicles, rather disgustingly, the mating habits of toads and frogs, taken from a book on the subject that Boyde reads in bed; the other deals with a quartet of secondary characters who are all unpleasant and venal, including a Mr. Crypt, the cadaverous butler in the neighboring house. This all amounts to a rather unpleasant stew about gay life in England in the 1960s, when homosexuality was both dark and (literally, in this case) dirty and dangerous.
Chopping’s writing, especially in its description of the natural world, is ambitious and often accomplished, and the character of Boyde, with his inability to imagine, let alone pursue, a life of dignity, is finally rather poignant.
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