The Farewell Symphony, by Edmund White (Vintage, £6.99 in UK)
Few mainstream literary writers have been as campaigning on the issue of homosexuality and particularly life under the threat of AIDS as Edmund White. His candour, elegant, conversational prose style and humanity has made it possible for many readers to reach some understanding of what it is like to pursue impersonal sex and also to be prey to a modern plague. This bizarrely beautiful, lengthy and demanding book is the final part of the remarkable informally autobiographical trilogy which began with A Boy's Own Story (1982) and continued in The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988). A sense of a personal odyssey pervades the first two previous instalments. This time, there is a sense of conclusion as White extends a gentle, fatalistic leavetaking, as suggested by the title, taken from Haydn's haunting orchestral work in which the musicians leave the stage one by one, until only a solo violinist remains. Unapologetically self-absorbed, White as narrator is as interested in others as he is in himself. He emerges as a bumbling romantic, at times desperate but always likeable. Long resident in France, he has never lost either his unmistakably American narrative voice nor his sense of humour. And it is this last-named quality that makes his litanies of personal and sexual disappointment and pain so sympathetic while always avoiding sentimentality. Bodily perfection has always been central to White's work, and the novel resounds with eulogies in memory of dead lovers as well as those who rejected him. Doomed to survival, he is both perennial unrequited lover and witness. This is the story of his loves, his obsessions and his griefs, and is also an valuable testament from a singular writer.
Eileen Battersby