Love, Leda

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He picks his way back towards the jukebox, stands looking at it, as though it held the interest of a book.

It could be the zoo or the people, but I’ve never given thought to the matter and I never found pleasure in a zoo in my life. Liked lots about this, but was very frustrated about the way the middle aged woman's body was described in such a derogative tone and it felt like the male characters had more space for variations within their gender bracket than the female ones. Much of what Hyatt is dealing with here is sensation – what it feels like to be alone, to drink strong coffee, to face rejection, to take a hot bath – and how that is experienced and processed by the subject. After reading the forward I said aloud, “Wow that’s the best forward I’ve ever read, this has got a lot to live up to! We meet him in his 20s, an existential, whimsical young man harbouring an unrequited love for a married straight man, and glimpse a series of days in his life.

Full of idiosyncratic writing and starkly fleeting encounters, Leda's loneliness is gut-wrenching and the book's climax almost brought me to years. In this sense, the novel is morally ambiguous and does not pass judgement on the times, which positively adds depth to Leda’s musings, as if the phenomenology of experience is more important that anything we can say about it, which is, of course, the one truth we do not express enough but that is the one thing that gives Leda courage. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bedsits with near strangers, as Leda is forced to find intimacy in unusual places.

Walking up the steps he opens the street door, leads me along a dark passage into a back room and turns on a yellow light. A new exhibition tells the story of “Love, Leda”, a newly discovered, never-before-published novel set in and around the streets of Soho in the years before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act that decriminalised homosexual acts between men.I don’t know why, but Regent’s Park holds a picture in my mind of a dead bird killed by human hands, and so cold. With an intensity of life-in-motion, a lyric of spirit and survival in pursuit of the existential, Hyatt vividly conjures his protagonist’s navigation of an era’s incipient edges. One of the commentators in the exhibition suggests that had the novel been published in the author’s lifetime, it could have been remembered as one of the great working-class literature of the time. If you loved Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar or Everything I Know About Love, you’ll love this book too.