December meme: The Charioteer as a war novel

naraht asked me to talk about Mary Renault's The Charioteer as a war novel.

I think TC has--very understandably--received so much attention as among the first gay novels in English with a happy ending that the extent to which it's also a Second World War novel is neglected. The war is omnipresent in the story: blackouts and air raid sirens, the aerial combat that happens over the hospital, the uniforms and fire-watch duties, the rationing and the sentimental songs. The lightning-fast romance of Laurie and Ralph, who go from "gosh, it's been seven years, what have you been doing?" to "and of course we'll live together, circumstances permitting" in the space of maybe a month and a half, strikes me as a very wartime thing too. A lot of straight couples got married after knowing each other for even less time.

The importance of the war in the book goes beyond background details, though. One thing I've been thinking about is Andrew's status as a conscientious objector. Modern readers tend to admire him for that, but I wonder whether Renault's original 1953 audience, many of whom would have served in the war in one capacity or another, would necessarily have done so. A lot of them, I suspect, might have been more inclined than modern readers to agree with Ralph's less sympathetic judgment of Andrew as "a passenger when human decency's fighting for survival." I'm not arguing that this is the right way to view Andrew, but I wonder whether in 1953, the novel would have come across as more critical of Andrew than it seems to readers now.

Most significantly and interestingly in my view, TC focuses on characters who have become disabled due to wartime injuries. There aren't a lot of war novels that do this--characters either die or they fight on. Laurie and Ralph's injuries are severe enough that neither will ever go into combat again, although Ralph continues to serve in the Navy in what seems to be an intelligence capacity. Most of the novel is of course set in a military hospital, and we follow Laurie through the last of several surgeries that don't repair his leg as well as he'd hoped, through physical therapy and the corrective boot to help him walk (the first version of which actually makes his leg worse), through his grief over his disability and his beginning to learn to live with it. Coping and adapting are things we see both Laurie and Ralph do a lot of: Laurie has to deal with stairs, low sofas, not being able to kneel in church, and pain and fatigue, while Ralph struggles with his car's gearshift and with other people's reactions to the sight of his damaged hand. I can't think of any other war-related story (in fact any story) where disability is so much a pervasive, ordinary part of the characters' lives. There's a general theme of physicality in the novel, and I think it's significant that it deals so matter-of-factly with the consequences of war on human bodies.

To conclude, I want to bring things back to the basic fact that The Charioteer deals with gay men serving in the armed forces in wartime. Even now, war novels and history books hardly acknowledge that such men existed, or lesbian servicewomen for that matter. It's sad that sixty years later, the trail that Mary Renault blazed in 1953 is still so little followed.