Jonathan Coe writes:

Where, then, does this leave last year’s offering, Old Men in Love? Is it an out-of-the-blue late masterpiece, or another cunningly disguised ragbag of odds and ends? The reader’s suspicions incline inevitably towards the latter but the agreeable truth, on this occasion, seems to lie somewhere in between. It is, for one thing, a substantial piece of work – Gray’s longest piece of prose fiction since Poor Things. Like that novel, it presents itself as a ‘found’ manuscript, which has fallen into the hands of Gray via its current owner, an American academic called Lady Sara Sim-Jaegar (an anagram of his own full name). The manuscript consists of three historical narratives and a series of diaries written by a retired Glaswegian schoolmaster, John Tunnock, a reasonably transparent alter ego for the author. The diaries concern Tunnock’s amiable, shambolic life in present-day Glasgow; Gray portrays him as an elderly dreamer, wrapped up in arcane historical research and oblivious to modern political realities, though an encounter with a female lawyer helps to radicalise him and prompts him to take part in an anti-war demo in 2003. He also begins a relationship with a much younger woman called Zoe (‘a person of my own height but sturdier, wearing a kind of battle dress with camouflage pattern designed for jungle warfare’), who throws herself at him for no very obvious reason. The three historical narratives are linked only very loosely, through a thematic connection with love in various manifestations: the first describes the love between Socrates and Alcibiades in ancient Athens, the second the love between Filippo Lippi and a nun in Renaissance Florence, and the third the lurid career of Henry James Prince, a Victorian priest who founded a sect called the Agapemonites and retreated to a country house in Somerset (dubbed ‘the Abode of Love’), where he surrounded himself with beautiful women – a fantasy Gray quite reasonably finds appealing.

(LRB 20 November 2008)

Bloomsbury | hardback 311 pp. |ISBN: 9780747593539