Reviews

Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall reminds us how fragile so much of gay existence was, is, can be, and has become - this history of ebbs and flows, of generations who lived in shadows and saw their youth fade as those who came to live in the light to come flaunted their beauty before them, of community and the spaces that hold us together against the outside world and its unknowns, of strength and resilience, as well as loss. Ready to Catch Him reminds us to not take any of this for granted and humbly reminds us not to underestimate the strength of any individual despite how they may (choose to) carry themselves. I do think this is a story worth telling and worth reading.

That said, Ready to Catch Him was a drag to get through, not because of the subject matter, but because of Bartlett's writing style. While I understand the importance of setting the scene and establishing the centrality of The Bar to the characters' lives, I found myself frequently lost in superfluous description that took my thoughts elsewhere. Likewise, the slow and uneventful progression of the relationship between Boy and O, which I also didn't realize would become the main and only storyline we'd be given, felt unnecessarily dragged out. Neither of these characters was particularly likeable and their dynamic rather questionable; I almost felt we would have gotten a better story understanding the life of our narrator.

Perhaps this was all intentional, an artistic choice - to show us how this unexpectedly perfect couple serves as a distraction (and thus serves as a distraction for the reader) from the brutality the community is experiencing at this time and why it is so important to everyone that they come and stay together - but I found those flashes of reality in Ready to Catch Him to be the moments I felt most alert and appreciative of this read. There are, (dare I say) of course, some beautifully captured sentiments that I really loved and wished I wasn't so distracted from by the neighbouring meandering text.

I dreamed I lived with you, but it was somewhere grander than this. A prince should have a palace. I am fucking a prince and I want to fuck him in a palace.

When I dream of a place where I might one day live, I also dream about some kind of a palace. I would live at one end of this great empty building and there would be a man living at the other. Between us there would be miles of derelict corridor and acres of grand, high-ceilinged, abandoned rooms, so many of them that I get lost, so many that I am always finding new rooms...and in these rooms I wander, and sometimes I meet strangers, and sometimes him, and then I make love to him in silence in the deserted ballroom with swallows coming in through the glassless windows and frescoed giants watching us from the ceiling, and we'd watch ourselves in the clouded mirrors. And then I'd return to my own rooms. At other times he would drive straight to where I lived, to the one lighted window in that whole ruined palace, and he'd stay for dinner and then he'd stay for days.

I so hope that one day you will be able to come to me and tell me that you too have found someone with whom to share your life, it is the greatest thing life has to offer and it would mean so much to me to be able to think of you in that way even if I cannot be there to watch just to know.

While he took the second record in the set out of its sleeve and carefully selected the right place on the second side for the needle to go down, but before he put the needle down, [he] went over to the window and threw it open, and [he] knew as he watched him that this was not just to let in the sun, which was now turning to real solid gold along the walls, making the flowers, even the dead ones, shine in strange high-summer colours, but also because he wanted all the neighbours to hear this song.

You need several rooms to love someone properly.

These texts demonstrate Bartlett's brilliance with words at, what this reader feels is, peak clarity. The final third of the novel had, I felt, the best sense of pace and direction. My frustration stems from feeling this novel could have been so much more.

lbrex's review

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5.0

Spring break has finally allowed me to finish this, and I'm very grateful for the break.

I continue to be stunned by Neil Bartlett. There's a hypnotic, erotic, and dream-like element to his books that has convinced me that they are some of the best gay male novels available to readers. Bartlett's books consistently map the intersections between violence, desire, and abjection in the lives of gay men, while they are also finely attuned to the works of earlier gay writers. The tributes to _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ that one finds here are beautiful, while the mysterious figures of "Father" and "Mother" that become central to the narrative deserve their own novels. Bartlett's readers will experience stupefaction from his work's strangeness, anticipation around his characters' sexual exploits, fear impending violence against vulnerable gay men, and admiration for the lyricism of a frankly aestheticist passage. As I was reading _Ready_, I was repeatedly uncertain about why I was reading, but I knew that I had to keep going, almost as if unraveling the story meant unraveling something about myself.

I could keep gushing, but really, the point of a good review on goodreads is to get you to read the book. In this case, if you're interested in fiction about sexuality or in gay novels, this is a must-read. I'm not sure I'll have many more concrete things to say until I've read this again or, alternatively, recovered from its spell.

mrh29992's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

dernichtraucherin's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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