The Sleeping Soldier
Grade : B+

Aster Glenn Gray is, in my humble opinion, a very underrated writer. I’ve only read a handful of her books, but they’ve all been well written and innovative, both thoughtful and thought-provoking, and the author is clearly not afraid to take risks in order to tell the story she wants to tell – even if sometimes, those risks don’t quite pay off. All of that is true of her latest novel, The Sleeping Soldier, which uses the Sleeping Beauty tale as a springboard for a story that explores the change in social attitudes to sexuality and same sex friendships that occurred between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries through the romance between a closeted college student and his ‘sleeping beauty’, a young Civil War soldier who wakes from a hundred year cursed sleep in 1965. I’m not normally the biggest fan of fairy tale retellings, but this is one of the few I’ve enjoyed (another is Briarley by the same author), even though the premise does require a strong dose of narrative convenience for it to work.

The story opens with the Sleeping Beauty-esque set up; a disgruntled fairy appears at the christening party for the baby boy born to the Krauses and curses him to sleep for one hundred years when he is pricked by a bayonet. Russell grows to adulthood and fights for the Union in the Civil War – and manages to avoid any bayonets until 1865 when, on his way home to Indiana for Christmas, he breaks up a fight, is raked by a bayonet and falls down as if dead. His parents take him back to their home – the Schloss – in Aurora, and lay him in his childhood bedroom.

Around a hundred years later, Caleb O’Connor, a student at Hawkins College (a liberal arts college) discovers the existence of the Schloss from a library book about Victorian mourning art, and is immediately fascinated by the photograph of a “life-sized waxwork: the Union soldier Russell Krause, so perfectly sculpted that he looked, at least in that black-and-white photograph, like a man asleep.” The caption to the photo explains the legend that the waxwork is not a waxwork at all, but a youth condemned to sleep for a hundred years until awakened by the kiss of true love. Months pass and it’s almost Christmas when, not sure what he’s looking for or expecting, Caleb decides to enter the house. It’s musty and dark, but beautiful, with high ceilings and a richly carved grand staircase – which creaks suddenly under the weight of boots. Caleb is frozen to the spot and can’t believe what he’s seeing – a handsome young man in uniform with a revolver at his hip, a riding crop in his hand and a kepi perched on his dark curls. It can’t possibly be – but it is. Russell Krause.

After the initial shock of such an unlikely encounter wears off, Caleb is surprised to realise he absolutely believes Russell’s tale of his cursed sleep, and that he has only recently woken up. Russell excitedly takes Caleb on a tour of the house – during which Caleb tries to give him a very potted account of some of the century’s important events – and Russell then explains he’s going to be a student at Hawkins (his mother appointed a lawyer to look after him shortly before she died, and that gentleman has enrolled him.) Caleb suggests a tour of the campus, and Russell readily agrees.

Russell follows Caleb to campus, where he makes friends straight away and becomes very popular among the student body. Everyone accepts his story (the narrative convenience I mentioned, which does, at least, do away with the need for constant repetition) and most of the teasing he gets is good-natured – he’s able to laugh at himself when he gets things wrong and he’s the life and soul of whatever group of people he’s in. His joy at discovering so many new things – television, escalators, department stores, the Beatles – is infectious, and his vivacity just leaps off the page.

Caleb becomes Russell’s guide to this unfamiliar world full of so many strange new innovations – and so many new and strange customs - and a deep and enduring friendship quickly develops between them. But the heart of the novel is the love story between these two men whose lived experience and social ‘conditioning’ is so very different; Caleb – who has only recently admitted to himself that he’s queer and is deeply closeted – and Russell, for whom having devoted, lover-like, friendships with other men is completely normal. Caleb is terrified that allowing Russell to be affectionate towards him in public will out him as homosexual to everyone else, but Russell doesn’t even understand the concept (which was only just emerging in the 1860s, I believe) and is upset when Caleb rejects even the smallest intimate gesture. It’s a brilliant idea – to use a close friendship between two men of different eras to show how the ‘rules’ for male friendships changed over time, how, in 1865, it was perfectly acceptable for men to share a bed or to take each other’s hands or arms and how, by 1965, the concept of masculinity has become so rigid that it doesn’t allow for men to show affection or vulnerability. The author’s research here is impeccable (and she talks about it at length in her author’s note, which is well worth reading) and it’s one of the things I liked most about the book, the way she rejects talking down the past as being necessarily a worse place to be in favour of showing that Russell’s time was simply different in a way that can’t be neatly categorised as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I also liked the way Russell debunks various myths about people of his time; for example, there’s an expectation that he’s prudish simply because he’s a ‘Victorian’ and that’s what people in 1965 have been led to believe Victorians were like, but when someone dumps a copy of Playboy in his lap, he’s completely unfazed, pointing out that in his day, women were completely naked in “dirty pictures”, and is disappointed in the modern style of “décolleté”, which doesn’t show very much skin at all!

One of the most moving aspects of the story is the portrayal of Russell’s loneliness and grief when it finally hits him that he’s lost everything and everyone he’s ever known and is completely adrift in a world that has changed almost beyond recognition in so many ways. His desperate sorrow and anger is a powerful contrast with his determinedly optimistic ‘energizer bunny’ personality from the earlier part of the book when he’s been so busy soaking up all the newness as a way of avoiding thinking about exactly what it all means for him.

Caleb is a solid, likeable character, and because the story is told entirely from his perspective, we’re privy to the fears that keep him in a state of inaction, and his struggle to work out how he can live honestly and be true to himself in a society that is still largely hostile towards homosexuality. Meeting Russell and learning of his very different views of masculinity and love and friendship makes Caleb start questioning the norms he accepts and lives by, but he has to break himself free of his inertia if he’s going to be able to move forward and reach for happiness with the man he loves.

For all its exploration of changing social mores, and what it means to live an authentic life in the face of bigotry, The Sleeping Soldier isn’t some kind of dry history lesson or polemic. There are some weaknesses – the set up, the convenience of the curse to explain who Russell is, the mysterious lawyer, for instance – but overall, this is a clever, funny and charming romance featuring two very different people finding their way to each other in the face of fears and prejudice and misunderstandings. I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for an historical romance with a difference.

Reviewed by Caz Owens
Grade : B+

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date : August 18, 2023

Publication Date: 08/2023

Recent Comments …

Caz Owens

I’m a musician, teacher and mother of two gorgeous young women who are without doubt, my finest achievement :)I’ve gravitated away from my first love – historical romance – over the last few years and now read mostly m/m romances in a variety of sub-genres. I’ve found many fantastic new authors to enjoy courtesy of audiobooks - I probably listen to as many books as I read these days – mostly through glomming favourite narrators and following them into different genres.And when I find books I LOVE, I want to shout about them from the (metaphorical) rooftops to help other readers and listeners to discover them, too.
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