Ned Baldwin is the Oakville-born descendant of a FOOF (Fine Old Ontario Family), counting Robert Baldwin among his ancestors. (Robert Baldwin was instrumental in brokering the French English accommodation that later led to the founding of Canada).
Ned grows up in the WASP enclave of Old Oakville in the 70s and 80s. His is a world bounded by Appleby College, the Oakville Club, St. Jude’s Anglican Church, and his literate, hard-working professional parents, devoted to their family.
By all indicators, his is the life of the insider par excellence.
Until it Shimmers is the first novel by Alec Scott, who is clearly a perceptive observer and knows the context and environment intimately. The novel has a strong sense of time and place, along with of the sense of privilege and of responsibility of a certain kind of Ontarian.
"What we need to do to make up for what we've done, from generation to generation. To compensate for the sins of our fathers," says Ned's younger brother Henry.
In today’s increasingly tolerant world of gender and sexuality fluidity, we have not yet forgotten how recently the world saw gender as binary and sexuality as a choice.
It is in that world that Ned, who knows with certainty that he is gay—and not by choice—comes of age. AIDs is rampant among gay men and is still a death sentence. A young man coming out as gay risks being cut off by his family, unhappiness and an early mortality.
"I wake up, and it’s the first thing I think of, the last thing before I go to bed, that I’m this…faggot. That I’ll always be this faggot." From insider to outsider, seeking acceptance from himself as much as from others.
We follow Ned from his graduation from the University of Toronto's Trinity College, where he has kept his secret from his parents and is beginning to contemplate coming out. His sexuality is guessed by a few close to him, but he seeks a different environment, a fresh start. He sets out for London.
His parents visit, and he finally comes clean to them in a comic-poignant scene that hardly sets the stage for smooth acceptance.
His mother’s grappling with the revelation, the loss of her dream future for her first-born son, is compellingly and sympathetically conveyed.
Ned’s explorations of Thatcher-era London’s gritty gay scene, his first encounters and his relationships make for gripping reading.He is a perceptive observer of cultural differences and class gradations himself, seeing London through the eyes of what the English still call “a colonial”. A lover of literature, he intersperses the narrative with allusions to English 20th-century authors, setting his own story in the context of the culture.
Read this book if you are new to Oakville and wonder about the milieu of those who have lived here for perhaps a generation or two.
Read it if you are part of that world.
Read it if you are British and have cultural disconnects with Canada or Canadian and have an outsider’s view of England.
Read it if you are young and coming of age, gay, straight or some other way of engaging with the world.
Read it if you are older and wonder what your gay friend faced in coming out, or if you went through a similar coming of age and want some insight, another story to help you understand your own.
But read it: I couldn’t put it down.
Released on July 1, Until it Shimmers by Alec Scott is published by AOS Publishing.