Shallow Treatment of Deep Issues
BY SHELLY BRYANT I October 27, 2009
John F. Rooney. The Rice Queen Spy. Senneff House Publishers, 2007. 280 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-9752756-6-5
John F. Rooney's 2007 novel The Rice Queen Spy centers around the life of a British spy Philip Croft who is outed by the service as a homosexual. The brutal treatment he receives at the hands of those in charge, which is represented in all of its stomach-turning pettiness, leads Croft to a new life, living openly as a gay man of a very specific sort, a rice queen. Readers who are not quite up on their Polari may not immediately recognize the term (it signifies a Caucasian gay man who shows a clear preference for Asian men), but this and other slang terms widely used in the gay community will become more familiar by the time the book is completed.
The world in which Croft moves is potentially quite interesting. In the period that the book covers, from the 1950s through the early years of this century, huge changes in the general attitude of the public toward homosexuals and homosexuality were underway. There is still a great deal of debate to be done before it is finally determined what the relationship between the sexual-preferences will be in our world, but this novel chronicles an interesting time in the development of that interaction.
Unfortunately, The Rice Queen Spy falls into some of the same types of weaknesses that I found in the other books by Rooney that I've read, especially a lack of good editing. There are many parts that are repetitive. The narrative gets bogged down way too often, and there are too many asides that really slow down the story. And the story itself, well... it isn't much of a story. The book lacks a well-defined plot, seeming instead to weave in a bit of observation about various places with a whole lot of description of gay sex. To make matters worse, Rooney doesn't do a good job of writing sex scenes. He seems to have missed out on the notion that it is always preferable to leave something to the imagination, rather than describing events in graphic detail. If one is to err in the reporting of a sex scene, it is always best to err on the side of too little information rather than too much. All of Rooney's novels that I've read could be improved if he implemented this little writing technique. Even so, the lack of a good solid plot in The Rice Queen Spy would not be made up for even if the racier scenes were written by a master of the art. It is just too loose. It seems as if nothing of importance happens, and that we just move from one sexual encounter to another. And that is a real pity because a character like Philip Croft going from middle age to old age could be quite interesting if there were just a little more story to it or if there were some attempt at a climax that had nothing to do with the bedroom. As it is, the story itself is just too limp to really work.
The book touches on some issues that could be very intriguing if explored fully. There is the obvious thread of bigotry with which the book opens. Reading Philip's engagement with a culture that shunned him because of his private practices was interesting enough, and the novel also did a fair job of having a look at some of the other issues that go alongside this bigotry. I liked that there were some glances toward issues that certainly deserve more attention, including the whole sex tourism industry, the leeches that often follow along within that industry (especially the pedophiles), and the colonizer/colonized relationship in which Croft consistently engages with the Asian men he constantly seeks out. I think those problems are worth more attention, though I would prefer to see them addressed in a book that goes through a more rigorous editing process than that to which The Rice Queen Spy was apparently subjected.
It is a pity that Rooney has only skimmed the surface of some of the deep issues he has raised in The Rice Queen Spy, seeming to prefer retelling the details of the various sexual encounters of the group of gay men we meet in the novel to actually exploring the troubling problems encountered within that community. While I do appreciate the attempt to portray Philip in a way that highlights his humanity by showing that the alienation he faces is misplaced, there is also something difficult to swallow in the representation of the sex-obsessed subculture to which he belongs. It seems to me that the hard thing to accept about Philip and some of his friends (most notably, I suppose, Binky) is not the homosexuality, but the fact that they so often exploit their partners. Whatever one thinks of the sexual preferences of this group of men, the disregard for the well-being of their partners is a very troubling issue. This theme did come to the surface toward the end of the book, and that point was, for me, the one redeeming quality of an otherwise weak tale.
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