Tom Rob Smith’s “Twenty Years Together” Puts Gay Marriage Under The Microscope
FEATURED: Twenty Years Together
The author of the Child 44 trilogy, Tom Rob Smith, turns his hand to gay relationships in the post-marriage equality age. Portia Turbo reacts for DNA: “This caught me off guard…”
Twenty Years Together is a look at modern love, marriage, family and homogenisation within the LGBTQIA+ community and within the individual. An easily readable page-turner, perfect for your summer by the pool or beach, on a train, plane, or cruise liner journey. Maybe just a cracking novel that will move you gently and inspire you to reconnect with your world… or not. +
In Twenty Years Together we meet Danny and Luis. Danny is a well-put-together, rangy Englishman, a failed thespian-turned-competent-nurse who has lived the party-boy life. Luis is a Spanish ex-pat lawyer, dedicated, ambitious, gorgeous and an enigma even to Danny.
Anyone who has spent any time in the gay community will recognise the protagonists. It’s easy to identify with them both at different times. They are not every gay, but every gay has slices of them woven into their own story.
They’ve been together for 20 years in a loving and nurturing relationship. They’ve bought property together in London and have a seemingly wonderful life. Having lived through the AIDS crisis and, now, with marriage equality achieved in the UK, Danny decides to propose. This changes the parameters of their relationship, and cue the tailspin.
Pull: “…they start to peel back the layers of armour, history, memories and hurts that have never been discussed.”
What happens next is totally unexpected and, for the reader, quite harrowing.
Everything about a wedding is fraught, even with a perfectly aligned straight couple. The newness of marriage equality, and that many in the LGBTQIA+ community never believed it would be possible in our lifetimes, brings cataclysmic thought adjustment. And on top, add in other layers: toxic families, internalised gay self-loathing and homophobia.
We grow up consistently hearing hate speech, bullying, and othering. Having it drummed so completely into our bones until we live believing our own lack of worth or even humanity. This is not a new concept, even in today’s more liberal era. So, we follow the two men as they start to peel back the layers of armour, history, memories and hurts that have never been discussed.
For two people who are already high-functioning adults in love, life and careers, this is still a coming-of-age story, dismantling decades of coping strategies and actions that have long passed their use-by date. They must relearn who they are and what they want from this one precious life we are given.
Without being a treatise on marriage, it looks at it through some oft-overlooked lenses, this strange, supposedly eternal, joining of two people that has grown from the heteronormative ownership of another human. The right to marry is what we fought for. Many of us actively campaigned, marched, wrote to elected officials, signed petitions, striving for equality and never thought we would win. There are moments in Twenty Years Together that caught me off guard with their raw reliving of my own pre-marital ambivalence.
My one sadness about Twenty Years Together is that much of this recreation gets short shrift and is glossed over. We miss so much of their titanic internal struggles. It feels like we are missing some of the heart of the journey. Maybe Tom Rob Smith finds it more powerful if we imagine the growth ourselves and give it flesh through our own struggles.
The UK author may be known to you for his Child 44 trilogy, which has sold millions of copies in 17 languages and was adapted into a 2015 film starring Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman. His debut won him the International Thriller Writers Best First Novel Award, the Galaxy Book Best New Writer Award, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. This is his first foray into a gay-themed novel.
Twenty Years Together is available now through Simon & Schuster Australia. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when two decades of love meet the weight of a marriage proposal, this one’s for you. Pick up your copy of Twenty Years Together by Tom Rob Smith.
