The Weight of Angels by John Boyne

Imagine how legendary playwright, poet, and the master of the bon mot Oscar Wilde would have lived his life had he not been imprisoned, exiled from England, and died in his forties. John Boyne’s The Weight of Angels creates the possible life he could have led.

 

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 Sodomite.” The celebrated playwright rose to the challenge and sued for the insult, a fateful decision which led to imprisonment, disgrace, and ultimately an early death. But what if he hadn’t responded this way? What course would Wilde’s life have taken?

John Boyne’s magnificent new novel, The Weight of Angels, takes this fork in the road as a starting point and imagines what would have happened if Oscar were alive to bear witness to the momentous events of the first half of the twentieth century. How would his life have turned out, what might he have written, whom might he have met? Could the second half of his life have been 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 Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path through a world which was to change beyond recognition in a few short decades.

For the next fifty-plus years, he will experience triumph and tragedy, pleasure and pain, love and regret, all while witnessing the twentieth century unfold around him in this mesmerizing novel.