Queer cat among the pigeons
In Marian Keyes's new novel, the gay best friend has finally made it to Ireland, via American sitcoms and Bridget Jones, but true to the Irish, and to Keyes, this gay best friend has a lot more to say for himself than his two-dimensional heterosexualised predecessors.
A few chapters into the Last Chance Saloon, the latest novel about the lives and loves of a group of Irish thirtysomethings living in London from Marian Keyes, queer alarm bells start ringing. Somebody observes that the main gay character is losing weight. A couple of pages later he develops a bit of a cough. All the signals are there to suggest that even now, when the gay-equals-AIDS-cliché has been trotted out in every literary genre on the block, Ireland's premier post-Binchy popular fiction diva is about to light-heartedly canter down that very same road. But then it emerges that Fintan doesn't have AIDS after all, he has lymphatic cancer. The alarm bells get louder. Is Keyes going to kill off her gay hero and so let her heterosexual characters go on to live "normal", fulfilled lives, redeemed by the fact that they once knew a wonderful gay man who was taken away in the prime of his life - without the AIDS cliché? You know the way it goes - like is short, kill the Queer and let the Straights learn from it. For a long time it seems as if this is the case all tied up with a glossy pink bow, but then Keyes subverts the maxim once more, and provides a happy gay ending.
In fact, if you look beyond the bubblegum packaging and nice "n" easy prose, you'll find that Marian Keyes likes nothing more than to use her oeuvre for a spot of cliché destruction, and even though her gay characters may exhibit lots of established queer comedic little foibles, they come out as the most interesting homosexuals to grace the pages of popular fiction since the gay best friend became de rigueur. Yet, she doesn't forget who she is marketing to. The Last Chance Saloon, like its predecessors, is primarily written for a 20 to 30-something female audience, and the protagonists here are the usual messed-up women who must grow in the story arc and learn to love themselves. That some of them do so, and also become characters who are not defined by the men in their lives, is a testament to what Marian Keyes is trying to do with the genre. Nowhere else in the proliferation of titles that have followed the Bridget Jones phenomenon you will find a female character who ends up happy to be single on the final page.
Likewise, Fintan, her first gay character since the two-dimensional friend in Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married, challenges the genre pre-conceptions.
"In a way he is the central character," says Keyes, "and he's the only one with a stable life", blasting two of the gay best friend rules immediately. Usually the queer body is used as a fuck-ed up mirror for the female lead, and he is always doomed to stay firmly in the background. Keyes isn't too enamoured with this "gay best friend" cliché either. "A lot of people my age have gay friends", she says, matter-of-factly. "It's no big deal. There are straight people and there are gay people and they are friends with each other."
Of course, central to the placing of Fintan as queer cat among the straight pigeons is his illness. There's nothing new in the way Keyes uses it as a pivotal learning process for her straight characters, but the book goes on to take the notion one step further and explore pre-conceived notions that are written in stone around gay men and serious illness.
"My primary purpose is to tell a story," Keyes enthuses, never losing sight of her audience, "but I did feel irritated with this prejudice around gay people and AIDS. If a gay man gets sick, people automatically assume it's AIDS. It's so short-sighted. Straight people get AIDS, and gay people get sick and it's AIDS. I did want to challenge that way of thinking, in a gentle way."
Gently it may be, but Keyes effectively rams her message home. Even Fintan's boy friend, who has recently lost a lover to AIDS, suffers under the assumption. Only Fintan, himself, dares to challenge the gay-equals-AIDS prejudice. Early on in the novel one of the female protagonists suggests that he might be positive. "Tara implies that Fintan has AIDS," Keyes takes the story up, "and he says to her 'have you? Have you had a test? Has your fella had a test?' that's the case. Even today, straight people might often think they are the immune."
Not your usual airport fiction fodder, then. While Keyes is at pains to point out her easy-reading tone, she's not one to shirk off when a challenging concept presents itself through her characters. "I always recognise that my readers are intelligent people, so I'm not going to feed them writing-by-numbers," she asserts, belying an agenda that goes beyond the purely marketable. Most of her readers certainly won't have been faced with the issues around AIDS and homophobia before, but they're guaranteed to lap it up and empathise in their droves. Perhaps that what called changing things from the inside out.