The Lantern Bearers [Paperback]

The story actually started thirty-five years hence, when Neil met with a publisher in an upscale Kensington restaurant to discuss his proposal that Neil write a biography of a composer who had died in 1963. It was to be 'an honest account. Provocative, if need be.' Neil had other business to attend to in London before he flew back to his home in Rome; he consulted an intestinal specialist who imparted the sad news that Neil was dying from inoperable cancer. The irrefutable evidence of his x-rays prompted Neil to accept the publisher's offer because 'I had to set the record straight. I had to unblock my memory, I had to make my atonement. Two ghosts from long ago had to be laid to rest.'

'The Lantern Bearers' by Ronald Frame is a dark tale of obsessive love and betrayal. It's a moody coming-of-age story of a gay adolescent in a class society; it's set in Scotland, but it could be anywhere. The narrative is spare, but it's sprinkled with colorful Scotticisms - not a word is wasted, and no more words are needed.

Neil was at the liminal age of being part boy and part man, and his experiences that summer were to haunt him for the remainder of his life. His sexuality was awakening, and he described his ambivalent feelings by saying, ' 'Masturbation'. 'Homosexual'. There was an association in my mind.' But his recollection of a movie theatre flasher belied the insights that he had gained from observing the lives of his new acquaintances: 'I knew what Maitland and Bone were, even though I didn't understand all that the condition entailed. What I chiefly realised was that the pair were different, they didn't live by the precepts of ordinary people, but didn't go out of their way to offend them either. They had fashioned their own world, observing their own values, which they protected as something apart but to which they had a perfect right.' As Neil's voice had cracked and changed, so did the world around him. In an attempt to prevent his home life from unraveling, he told his father a lie that would have dire consequences.

About halfway through this page-turner, I decided to look up Robert Stevenson's 'The Lantern-bearers' on the Internet, because the novel's narrative is spliced together with words from this short essay, along with Neil's reflections on them. It was quite easy to find the full text; it was part of a larger work entitled 'Across the Plains.' I enjoyed rereading it as I finished the book. For, as Neil said, '[t]here was no proper narrative. In the essay, Stevenson had offered poetic prose descriptions. Bone was locating his drama in the continual shifts and contrasts of tone, the counterpointing of moods, veering and tacking over and over again.' The essay told a story of boys who had attached 'toasted tinware' candle lanterns to cricket belts worn on their waists and concealed beneath buttoned-up overcoats. 'By their lanterns the boys will know one another; they are bonded in a brotherhood by the shared secret of what they carry under their coats hidden from view.' I found this image hard to visualize until I happened to come across a reproduction of 'The Lantern Bearers,' a 1908 oil painting by Maxfield Parrish that portrayed a more fanciful rendering of a similar scene. Of course, the image is metaphorical, too, but Stevenson's descriptive prose makes one want to picture such a phenomenon.

As an author of eleven previous books, Mr. Frame shows a mastery here of the art of writing fiction about music, composers, and composition. I'm not a musician and not able to attest to the authenticity of this aspect to the story, but composer Ned Rorem has given it high praise. Mr. Frame allows the reader to climb inside his characters' skulls, thereby becoming part of the artistic and creative process of musical composition, to experience the joys and frustrations that accompany such an endeavor. 'The Lantern Bearers' is a worthy successor to the works of Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock, and it won the Saltire Award for Scottish Book of the Year in 2000.

At the inception of this book Frame places the narrator of this tale of adolescent social, hormonal, emotional, discovery of love, foraging self, writhing into the threats of adulthood, and ultimately the meaning of taking responsibility for actions, in the body of a cancer stricken adult who seeks atonement for a misled life by writing the penultimate biography of one Euan Bone, a composer of importance who died surrounded by mystery.

With this intriguing introduction Frame takes us back to a summer when the narrator served as apprentice and collaborator with a composer while on a summer hiatus from a strained family home in Glasgow. In this short time Neil (our 14 year old narrator) discovers the magic of music, learns the intricacies of composition, of gay relationsips, of his own awakening of sexuality, only to have that tenuous bridge to adulthood betray his new world as his voice changes from child to man. His value to the composer at an end, Neil begins to stalk his hero and ultimately is driven to create a vicious lie of child molestation which he watches burgeon into the ultimate death of his beloved hero.

While some authors would need at least 500 pages to sort out all the implications and embellishments such a bizarre tale might require, Frame's glorious mastery of words leads us steadily and compulsively through this story in a mere 224 pages, each page polished with thorough knowledge of music, of English and Scottish society, of literature, of regional terms and words that make this book so unique in flavor. There are moments when the nature of a fruitful relationship between two artists suggests Benjamin Britten/Peter Pears, Christopher Isherwood/Don Bachardy, et cetera. But that is only one aspect of this stunning masterwork. Yes, there are lessons richly deserving to be learned, insights into Scotland's beauties, hints of the creative forces in the minds of the blessed creators of the arts. But mentioning these only grazes the surface of what to me is one of the finest books written in the last decade. This book deserves a very wide audience. By all means READ THIS!