Can one bad decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed?
When the Marquis of Queensbury left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words, ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite’. The most feted playwright of his day famously sued for libel which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution, and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiralled into public disgrace, humiliation, and an early death.
But what if he had simply ignored the insult? What direction might his life have taken? This is the premise of John Boyne’s extraordinary new novel, The Weight of Angels.
Rather than dying in penury in Paris at the age of forty-six, what if instead he had lived to bear witness to the momentous events of the first half of the Twentieth Century, the cataclysmic changes the world was to undergo, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life was to be as celebrated, dramatic, tumultuous, and exhilarating as the first?
In imagining the life that Oscar Wilde never had, John Boyne has written one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the great Anglo-Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path.
