Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #206925 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

Review
"James Lear's novels have dominated gay erotic fiction charts since publication...Just a few pages in, the secret of Lear's success becomes blindingly apparent. Practically every page is graced with an abundance, a pornucopia if you will, of graphic bonking...but it's not just the sex that keeps you reading. Lear's prose is vibrant and colourful...This isn't porn accompanied by a wah-wah guitar, this is porn to the strains of Beethoven's 'Ode To Joy', each vividly realised ejaculation accompanied by a fanfare and the crashing of cymbals." -- Time Out London--June 2008

Customer Reviews

Graphic Sex
It is 1930 London and Paul Lemoyne is an eighteen year old who has just moved there from the country. He begins his new life as music hall stagehand and soon discovers the seamy gay side of the city. Such is the idea of James Lear's ("The Back Passage") new novel, "The Palace of Varieties".
The book is very graphic and very well written. Again Lear captures us with his ability to tell a good story. However, this time the story is lost in the sexual escapades of our main character.
Lear knows how to create characters and his Paul is a gay rent boy and sociopath who just never learns from his own mistakes and failings. He manages to ruin everything he comes into contact with in his quest for absolute sexual pleasure. He has talents and good qualities that he ignores so that he can degrade himself completely. Lacking a moral backbone and with no values, he is a plain and simple sex addict. He deserves what he gets and the reader has no sympathy for him whatsoever.
The storyline of the book is secondary to the sexual exploits of our "hero" and I use that term loosely. He is a man with no morals nor feelings and he has so much sex that he comes across as quite a depraved character that does not have any qualities worth identifying with. He is just a hedonist and it seems to me that it is a shame for an author like Lear who can write beautifully to waste so much time on sexual acts that are disgusting to a degree.
The storyline could have been developed into an interesting read if some of the sex was pushed to the side. In reality, the book is as close to pornography as possible and what a pity. I am sure there is an audience for books like this but I, myself, would have more enjoyed less sex and more story.

Well Written! Lots ofVarieties!!
Great story that moves along smoothly. Well-developed characters with lots of variety of sex. Just the right splash of emotions an angst of lead character who is 18 at time of story. Very easy to read with lots of gay sex! Lear captures the emotions and changing situations of our hero and has interesting characters that come along for the ride. "Excuse the pun!" I wasn't disppointed.

"Immersed in the world of vice, but not so far gone that I had lost all moral sense."
Bawdy, squalid and irreverent, James Lear's sexually graphic novel transports us to London of 1935 and into the life of eighteen-year-old Paul Lemoyne, a waif and wild child whose fleshy adventures play out amongst the rarefied world of music halls, train stations, public toilets and the sordid back alleys of South London. Escaping an abusive and alcoholic father, who cannot help but conceal his shame beneath a pitiful display of hostility ,Paul escapes from Sussex and hops on a train to London from Sussex.

Although Paul has very little education, he possesses a fierce natural intelligence; it's not surprising then that he is able to secures employment as a stage hand at the South London Palace of Varieties, a bawdy and ramshackle music hall, smelling heavily of unwashed bodies, cigarette smoke and perfume. Under the tutelage of Mr. Nicholas Holly the General Manager, Paul begins his services in this grand life of hard physical labor, that involves clambering around scaffolds and sweeping the stage, and also allowing Holly to give Paul oral satisfaction when Holly so desires it.

But it is in the gentleman's cloakroom in Waterloo station which really cements Paul's career as a procurer of male needs, where one can "wash and brush-up for a sixpence" and where at the urinal involving two young gents in identical black suits, Paul has his first true sleazy experience where he also gets to earn his first crown. Soon enough Paul's consumed with the idea of getting sex wherever and with whoever he can, becoming a master of this extracurricular work.

While Paul aches to conquer the red-headed Kieran, his affable young work colleague, he's also helped by Vera, a genial and somewhat effeminate dresser in business like ambition of servicing many of the "toffs and stage-door johnnies" that come to the performances, especially the giant Mr. Newsome with his hands on his hips, "his huge weapon throbbing before him," and where he and Paul end up taking pleasure in each other as "crudely and as brutally" as they liked.

Paul rapidly becomes an enterprising young man, luckily blessed with a true tart's instinct for divining the wishes of his clients and he begins to ply his trade at the various pubs that pepper the East End, low dives, frequented largely by stagehands, prostitutes, laborers and itinerants. The stink of beer and fags and unwashed men requiring him to be crude and coarse and above all dirty. But it is through Paul's association with Mr. Albert Abbott who takes a beneficent in him forcing him to do dirty things with a handsome art deco paperweight that Paul is eventually thrust into bigger markets in an effort to make real money and perhaps also the chance to make something more of himself.

Although Albert swiftly becomes the ruling passion in Paul's life, he's always there playing Paul like a puppet, even pecuring him the genius artist Mikhail Boleslavsky while also levying a certain amount of his cash flow. Albert Abbott is just one just one of a dozen colorful characters who populate Paul's little world, they're the supporting players in a smut-filled dream of which Paul is always the hero. Author James Lear's unashamed descriptions of Paul's sexual philandering is shocking, but it is the author's colorful combination of 1930's London and its world of vice along with descriptions of Paul engaging in some of the most degrading sexual activities that make this novel so unbelievably entertaining and also so shocking. Mike Leonard August 08.