Review: Alec by William di Canzio

This review was originally published on my personal blog in January 2022

E.M. Forster’s Maurice–written in 1913 and published posthumously in 1971– is one of the classics of queer literature. The romance between the middle-class Maurice Hall and the working class Alec Scudder has imprinted itself on generations of gay and bisexual men, especially after the enormous success of the Merchant Ivory film adaptation. It was thus extremely ambitious of William di Canzio to decide to retell this story from Alec’s perspective and to imagine a future for the two lovers. If he had fallen short of his goal, readers may have felt his novel was equivalent to bad fanfiction, which can be found on websites all over the Internet. However, this is not the case and di Canzio succeeds in retelling and extending Forster’s story.

Forster’s novel-as is evident from the title– is mainly about Maurice (in fact Alec doesn’t even enter the narrative until the last quarter of the novel). Alec’s character mainly serves as a foil and a contrast to that of Clive, Maurice’s first great love. While Clive, the upper-class English gentleman, describes his sexuality by quoting Plato and eventually enters into a heterosexual marriage, Alec (referred to in the novel mainly as “Scudder” as befits his status as a servant) has no qualms about sharing his body with Maurice. Forster describes the scene when Alec climbs up the ladder into Maurice’s bedroom at Penge as follows:

But as he returned to his bed a little noise sounded, a noise so intimate that it might have arisen inside his own body. He seemed to crackle and burn and saw the ladder’s top quivering against the moonlight air. The head and shoulders of a man rose up, paused, a gun was leant against the window sill very carefully, and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered ‘Sir, was you calling out for me?…. Sir, I know… I know,’ and touched him(Forster 192).

Thus, in some ways, Alec serves as a fantasy figure in Forster’s novel. He is simply the working-class man who awakens Maurice to the physical side of homosexuality. His own character is not particularly well developed and he merely serves a narrative function.

In contrast to Forster, di Canzio’s novel focuses on Alec as the central character (this is again evident in the choice of title). The story begins with Alec’s birth and he doesn’t even meet Maurice until the end of Part 1. Part 2 retells Forster’s novel with all the incidents that are familiar to us from the book and the movie. This section liberally includes passages from the original book (di Canzio was given the necessary permissions from Forster’s estate). It is in part 3 that di Canzio’s novel really comes into its own as the lovers both enlist in the army during World War I and go through their own wartime experiences. Forster’s novel avoided the War entirely. In an earlier version he had included an epilogue in which Maurice’s sister Kitty came upon the lovers in the greenwood “some years later” after the main action of the novel. However, as Forster notes in his “Terminal Note”, this epilogue failed because “some years later” would have been in the middle of World War I. Di Canzio made the decision to include the war as a major part of the narrative and to have the lovers separated, each wondering if the other is alive.

Another interesting aspect of di Canzio’s novel is the inclusion of historical characters in the narrative. Forster himself appears as a character (he is referred to as “Morgan”) as do George Merill and Edward Carpenter. It was a visit to Merrill and Carpenter at Milthorpe that inspired Forster to write Maurice and it is thus a nice allusion to include the two men in the novel. Alec is thus a mixture of fiction and history.

Overall, Alec is a wonderful reimaging of Forster’s classic. It is thanks to di Canzio that queer readers get the chance to revisit two of our most beloved characters.