The Weight of Angels by John Boyne: Book Review

The biographical details of Oscar Wilde’s life are well known, especially its final act - the trial, prison term and early death alone in Paris. There still lingers the residue of contemporary popular opinion that he somehow deserved his fate, that he flew too close to the sun, thought too highly of himself, and needed to be put back in his place.

This was, after all, the man who posterity claims said at customs on arrival in the US that he had nothing to declare but his genius.

Oscar Wilde, however, was also the writer of a string of plays, poetry, stories, essays and a novel that have remained alive and vital and, more miraculously, performed and in print, to this day.

So my guess is that apocryphal Oscar was right, he was a genius.

In The Weight of Angels, Irish writer John Boyne dives into Oscar Wilde's biography and changes a single one of his many decisions and by doing so grants him a long, rich and eventful life. The decision?

On receiving the slanderous card left at his club by his lover, Lord Alfred Douglass’ father, Marquise of Queensbury accusing him of being a sodomite, Boyne's Oscar Wilde shrugs off the insult, thereby reducing it to personal slight rather than a public scandal, and gets on with his life.

And what a life he leads.

Boyne’s imagined life doesn't shy away from tragedy, and it charts the ebbs and flows of the creative life, giving Oscar failures, seeing him drift in and out of the spotlight, but it also gives him love, happiness and adventures in an ever evolving world that are a delight to witness.

But why would Boyne choose to give a happy, long life and the last word to Oscar Wilde, a gay, brilliant, controversial literary figure who found success outside his Irish homeland and was famously hounded to his grave by narrow-minded bigots?

Well that is anyone's guess.