Gay-blade novel cuts deep

Terence Teasdale’s debut novel still doesn’t answer the question of where Thailand will find its first great expat author, but it’s a further indication of solid progress being made.
Although “Trafalgar & Josh” is flawed in pace and plot, it has nice dramatic surges and overall basks in the glow of good writing. There are frequent flares of very good writing as well, but too often they’re extinguished in a morass of superfluous words.
Teasdale has lived in Thailand for two years and spent that time completing this book. The story visits Bangkok, Phuket and Pattaya, but most of it unfolds in Teasdale’s native Australia.
Trafalgar Trayton is just closing a successful career as a psychiatrist in Sydney and, emerging from the closet to shake off his long-time wife, falls in love with rent-boy Josh.
In this “gay novel” – launched at the Venue, a gay club in Pattaya – the action moves from Bondi Beach to Boyztown without overt sexuality, beyond some passionate kisses and sedate nuzzling in bed. This is not, thankfully, a corset buster for guys, and the cover illustration of surf-swept rocks on a sunset shore is devoid of embracing lovers.
Instead, Teasdale offers a more highbrow story about troubled romance that straights can enjoy too. In fact, heterosexual expatriates who’ve tried and failed at love with much younger Thai sex workers will recognise the ups and downs that rational, discreet Trafalgar endures with flighty, petulant Josh (as will anyone who’s ever read a bargirl book).
The difference here is that Josh is of the same nationality as Trafalgar – and mentally unhinged anyway. He’s schizophrenic (or bipolar, or whatever they call it now) and a heavy drinker, swinging from cute to wrecking-ball crazy with frightening speed and frequency.
This gives the novel the irresistible allure of watching a train wreck, with successive posh restaurants – where the wealthy Trafalgar always seems to have his favourite table waiting – serving as the settings for one public spectacle after another.
Josh is constantly upending dinner and, worse, brutally assaulting his retiree boyfriend, and yet Trafalgar always forgives him. The shrink, a specialist in schizophrenia and also a scholar in Buddhism, obviously doesn’t want to find the exit to this remake of “Fatal Attraction”.
It would be nice to sympathise, but Trafalgar is just one more malfunctioning unit in a book without a single likeable character.
Teasdale might think otherwise and see his protagonist as a noble, cultured man, but Trafalgar gets drunk with Josh one night and they end up giddily screaming phone threats at his daughter. He’s incensed when she seeks a court injunction to keep him away.
The other chief problem with the book is the tedious detail. It’s 400 pages but could be 100 pages shorter (and better) without the ornate, Rococo fetish for decor and clothing, every item described as though for a connoisseur’s magazine, and without the countless baffling literary and historical allusions.
“He liked to impress, and used his intelligence and command of English, brandished with Shakespearean eloquence, to intimidate others,” Teasdale complains about one of his characters, not seeming to recognise the irony as he piles on the Byron quotations and Latin proverbs.
Grammar Nazis might demand the book be burned on charges of comma abuse, but a stronger case is to be made against the novel’s frequent ill-considered passages like this one: “His collar, undisciplined, sat-up like miniature impotent wings, exposing the slipped, unferred Windsor knot of a Pompeian red tie.”
A good editor would take the hyphen out of “sat-up”, ask Teasdale if he meant “unfurled”, suggest the spelling “Pompeiian” instead, and point out that, on the next page, another character is wearing a tie that’s “communist red”. Or maybe the editor would just delete the sentence.