Output details

Lessons from cruising

'Lessons from Cruising' was written in direct response to Edna O'Brien's story of a similar length, 'Paradise' (The Love Object, Penguin, 1970). O’Brien’s story provides the central theme of a character with a consciously restricted life in a relationship with a man of extreme wealth, and drawn by him into a summer holiday where she is 'on display' and expected to overcome limitations (non-swimming) so as to embrace his passion for the sea. In ‘Lessons From Crusing’, the story is re-gendered to make the relationship gay; shifted to twenty-first century realities; extends the traditional 'coming out' story to middle-age but with a similar age and national identity; incorporates recent scientific and environmental understanding (of air quality and diesel particulates) as a motivational factor for actions, which latter element is in direct response to the campaign for artistic encounters with air quality issues promoted by Invisible Dust http://invisibledust.com/. Location details were acquired through a private site visit to the penthouse atop Beetham Tower, Manchester, with its architect Ian Simpson; a sea voyage in Plymouth Sound; interviews with boat captains in Plymouth Sound. Where a tragic ending would have been typical of twentieth-century gay fiction, by contrast ‘Lessons in Cruising’ offers an alternative fictive model of a mature gay relationship that is maintained rather than ended. Unlike O'Brien's, the main protagonists are named and the piece is told in the first person. The traditional mode of the unreliable narrator is altered by the narrator's self-presentation as fabulist, so story-telling is shown to be a protective shield that the narrative carefully removes.