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Article: A tale of two arrogant Eton boys who tried hard not to do their best We are free to stay out of the game but doing less than our best is fatal
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- May 5, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1996 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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In his new book The Fatal Englishman, Sebastian Faulks presents
the lives of three young men who came to grief. Two of them were
homosexuals; all died or were killed long before their time. One of
them, Jeremy Wolfenden, was a friend of mine when we were both at
school, and for a time - talking or writing long letters - we tried
to devise a common strategy for living.
Sebastian Faulks is an excellent novelist, but canny about
reviewers. He guessed from the outset that they would pounce on
this book as a 1990s version of Enemies of Promise, Cyril
Connolly's lugubrious account of gifted Etonians coming to grief in
a previous age. To protect himself, Faulks refuses to draw any
grand moral ...