Thy Mother's Glass

Hugh Oliver is Editor-in-Chief, OISE Press.

Mostly written in the first person, this novel, I suspect, is largely
autobiographical. Certainly the settings—I cannot say as to the
characters—seem to parallel those of the author’s own life. Born in
1926 to rather impoverished middle-class parents, the main character
(through whom most of the story is told) is raised in Cornwall
(England). He is a precocious child who enjoys an uneasy relationship
with his dominant mother, from whom he experiences a traumatic
separation at the start of World War II. On joining the navy towards the
end of the war, he (or, at any rate, the reader) discovers that he is
gay, and after an interlude of about a year in post-war Paris, he takes
off for California with his new-found lover, a Stanford graduate. There,
after a 20-year interval, he is visited by his mother, who, partly out
of her own experience, is at last able to come to terms with his
homosexuality.

The book has numerous excellently drawn characters, and speaking as one
brought up in England in the same era, I can vouch for the author’s
discriminating recollection of period detail. At first I felt the style
was rather stilted; but after a few chapters, I became harmonized to it.
Certainly the novel provides some revealing and sympathetic insights
into what it is to be gay.