Zoe Carney's Reviews > My Policeman

Edit October 2022: wow, lots of people found this review, huh? I haven't replied individually because tbh, it's more than 8 years since I read the book and my memories of it are sketchy, although I do remember wanting to throw it across the room. If you loved it, that's great! I'm happy for you :) I'll bet there's other stuff that I've read and loved that you hated. Maybe the film will make me feel differently, or maybe not. Either way, I stand by my review.

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I was both fascinated and immensely annoyed by this book. The blurb describes it as a tragic love story, of a man and a woman both in love with the same man in a time (the 1950s) when it is safer for him to marry the woman and maintain a front of respectability. As a longtime reader of LGBT fiction, it sounded like exactly the sort of book I would love.

I didn't. In the spirit of fairness, I should list its good points: 1950s Brighton is beautifully vivid, and the prevailing attitudes of the time are well-captured. Patrick and his mother are wonderful characters, Julia (a relatively minor character, yet an important one) is great, and the relationship between Tom and Patrick feels era-appropriately dangerous.

However, Marion - the main protagonist - is an out and out bitch. I don't use that word lightly, but honestly, I don't think I've hated a female character this much since Mary-Anne in the Tales of the City series. I think we're supposed to empathise with her plight - she's young and unworldly, living in a time when homosexuality just wasn't talked about, so when she announces that she's in love with Tom and is warned by his sister, no less, that he's 'not like that' she's naively (or willfully) unaware of what that means.

I wanted to punch her then, and I didn't shift much on that opinion throughout the rest of the book. If anything, my loathing deepened as it became clear exactly what she'd done to dispose of her opposition. She loses a good fried - Julia - in her refusal to accept her husband's 'perversions', loses her husband his career, and destroys Patrick's life. And all so she can 'win' Tom, a plot which (thankfully) backfires spectacularly, leading to a loveless, sexless, forty year marriage. (What is never made clear is why Tom would choose to stay with this awful human being in later years when divorce and homosexuality both became more socially acceptable. Another big failing from my perspective is that Marion's point of view is so dominant, there isn't room for Tom to speak for himself.)

The ending is heartbreaking. Marion finally does the right thing and tells Tom and the ailing Patrick what she did, and true to form, disappears to leave them to deal with it. I was so angry with her by this point that I didn't even care that the ending was a bit cliched and unnecessarily dramatic.

In short, this isn't a gay romance, nor an exploration of the difficulties of maintaining a public face and an illegal private love. It's a straight woman's vision of those things, written for other straight women, and as I don't fall into that category I found it incredibly insulting and annoying. In the hands of a different writer I believe it could have been far more sensitively handled, and Marion could have even become less loathsome. As it is, for all its good points, it remains horrible.