Nick Maynard is a queer actor/director/writer from Manchester in the UK who has just had his first book published with New Generation Publishing as part of the Pen to Print initiative, supported by Arts Council England.
The story is set in his hometown in 2003, and has a queer disability storyline. The book is unusual because it plays with the idea of what a book can be and gives the reader a whole new way of experiencing a novel.
Cripple is the story of Jonathan, a twenty-two year old quadriplegic, and his middle-aged widowed mother, Carol.
One night Jonathan imagines that his body straightens and restores itself to its former perfection. In Jonathan’s twilight world he is able-bodied and perfect. He lives out his desires here, based on his daydreams about the boy who waits at the bus stop opposite the bedroom window. Jonathan calls the bus stop boy David. In his mind he creates David a life as an art student and soon they become close friends.
Jonathan’s mother, frustrated with the isolation of living alone with a severely disabled son, sees the same boy and invents her own relationship with the fantasy David. Reality and fantasy soon become blurred, as mother and son escape their drudgery by living in their dreams. For her it is an affair with a younger man who wants to ‘take her away from all this’, for Jonathan, the friendship develops into a voyage of sexual discovery as he realises that his new friend is gay.
Jonathan experiences his sexual awakening on Manchester’s Canal Street, in the clubs, pubs, and drug scene that it The Gay Village. At first, he is worried that his fantasies are gay but soon begins to explore his sexuality and inevitably gives in to his desires for David.
Throughout the story we hear the internal dialogues of mother and son as they talk to us and themselves in the privacy of their own thoughts. But as the story concludes Jonathan hears his mother’s thoughts – as she is on the point of leaving him behind and running away with David – the boy who is now Jonathan’s boyfriend. Through David’s conversation with Jonathan, Carol is made aware of her son’s relationship with her lover and the love triangle is exposed, as mother and son are linked in their thoughts for the first time. The story ends with their ability to finally communicate with one another.
The story’s final image is of a young man waiting at the end of Canal Street. But who is it?
The book is currently on sale at Amazon in the UK and the USA
Labels: 2021, Manchester, Nick Maynard, novel
