Oh, England. What won't your schoolboys get up to? Take Alexander Aylmer. The randy Eton student sneaks into his favorite male teacher's sitting room, strips naked, and rolls himself up in a rug, leaving beside it a note saying 'This birthday gift is for you to enjoy in any way you can think of.' He's thirteen.
Nick Richardson has shocked readers of the erudite London Review of Books with his post praising this novel Alexander's Choice
[Kindle] by the pseudonymous Edmund Marlowe
. Richardson says, "the sex scenes are thrillingly frank." His review:
"Marlowe’s book describes the erotic awakening of a precocious 13-year-old aristocrat called Alexander Aylmer. The year is 1983, and in his second month as a member of (the fictional) Peyntors House – ‘a very old-fashioned house, the most old-fashioned in the school’ – Aylmer has just enjoyed his first orgasm...
"An older boy called Julian, whose father is a removals man who saved for years to send his son to Eton, flirts with Alexander, and Alexander flirts back. There are a couple of agonisingly unconsummated trysts. Alexander goes to Julian’s room brandishing a copy of Cider with Rosie and tells him to read a passage: ‘Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad; some found their comfort in beasts; and there were the usual friendships between men and boys who walked through the fields like lovers.’ But Julian wimps out of acting on the younger boy’s brazen come-on: ‘He had approached Alexander physically in every way possible short of the overtly romantic and still he had not managed to dare to cross that threshold.’
"Julian’s father receives a letter from the boys’ housemaster informing him of his son’s ‘unhealthy interest in much younger boys’ and the relationship is put on hold. But meanwhile, the tension between Alexander and his English teacher, Damian Cavendish, ‘the nicest beak he had come across’, is mounting. Damian organises some after-hours tutorials, and rereads a book called Greek Love: The Role of Pederasty in the Classical Age to help justify his feelings to himself; Alexander reads The Persian Boy
[Kindle]
and imagines himself ‘in Damian’s bed, willing slave to his own King, while Damian, wild with lust, kissed him all over’. Finally, on his birthday, Damian comes home to find his sitting-room rug rolled up... which turns out to be – surprise! – Alexander with no clothes on. Damian admires the boy’s ‘smooth twin orbs’ and his ‘delicate bulge’, which, though ‘manifestly smaller than Damian’s own’ is nevertheless ‘evidently virile’. Then they have sex.
"At 416 pages, Alexander’s Choice is perhaps a little long. Marlowe also enjoys using Eton’s esoteric argot, words like ‘div’ (lesson) and ‘beak’ (teacher), each defined on its first appearance in a series of unwieldy passages..."
The Daily Mail reports another aspect of the novel is the inevitable parsing of characters to determine who might be based on whom, given the many notables at Eton in 1983:
"OE author Guy Walters tells me: ‘The book is set in the Eighties when I was there — David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Earl Spencer, Dominic West, the actor — were all contemporaries. It paints an incredibly racy picture of gay sex at Eton. Put it another way: it’s really dirty.’ Needless to say, Marlowe is a pseudonym, but Walters has no doubt the author is a genuine OE. ‘It’s quite clear from descriptions of the school and nicknames for things that whoever wrote it was with us at school,’ he says. ‘And there is a great guessing game going on trying identify who the people in the book might be in real life.
Bookshelves overflow with novels about student-teacher relationships, but for a factual account of how it really went down with the ancients, get the Lammy winner The Greeks and Greek Love
by James Davidson.
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is now a movie that he adapted and directed. Most critics have singled out its gay character, Patrick, played by Ezra Miller. 
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