A review by geofroggatt
Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer

3.0

This book is not for everyone. A book about secretly gay neo-nazis is always going to have limited appeal. Add to this the very explicit racial violence and you know this isn’t going to be an easy read. That being said, if you can accept the necessary (but challenging) violence and racial language, then this is a strangely compelling read. The story revolves around two men coming of age in different eras of Britain’s brash, violent and highly neurotic gay skinhead culture. Schaefer’s debut novel is built on two alternating narrative threads. The first focuses on Tony, a teenager whose sexual awakening occurs at nearly the same time he becomes involved in England’s white-power movement of the '70s. The second thread, set in 2003, concerns James, a young writer researching the very movement that Tony was involved in. Alternating between the two time periods is a revealing conceit: It shows how time transformed skinhead culture from something that was brutally racist to a relatively benign sex fetish. I’ve always been a big fan of novels that revolve around taboo subjects and/or unlikable/dark protagonists, and this novel has both. Immediately we are introduced to Tony, who goes from cruising in the men’s bathroom to committing extreme racial violence and hate crimes in explicit detail. If you can’t get past this first chapter, this novel won’t be for you. We deeply explore the mindset and perspective of Tony, both a gay man and a neo-Nazi, as he explores his life as he navigates both the underground gay scene and the skinhead subculture of London. This book uses these two timelines to explore neo-Nazi subcultures and groups and how they operate and how they’ve changed. This book easily took the reader behind the curtain to show the behind the scenes of people and groups like this, and it did it without glorifying or justifying these groups, while at the same time giving empathy to these characters as full human beings with complexities and nuances. I liked how hypocritical Tony’s gay identity was with his identity as a neo-Nazi, and it was interesting seeing all the places that hypocrisy took him throughout the story, even going as far as having sex with guys from different races despite his beliefs. I liked how this book showed Tony adopting this subculture just as a way to find an identity, and how he was molded more and more by that environment and changed because of that. It was interesting seeing how these different neo-Nazi groups operated, especially seeing how many different factions there were since not all of them saw things in the same way or believed in all the same things. Seeing the neo-Nazi rock and roll subculture and how they operated and advertised themselves was an interesting piece of history. While I did like the idea of two separate perspectives and timelines that intersect with this subculture at the centre, it was not at all satisfying. James’s perspective wasn’t as interesting, and Tony’s was much more engaging and overtook all my interest. While I did like how this book explored a taboo subculture, I thought that it was all very surface level. I would have liked to see more of these characters upbringings and beliefs outside of this underground identity, but all we really got was the idea that this identity became more of a style and that many of these gay neo-Nazi (or just the ones in this story) were just lost lonely boys playing dress up and wanting some sort of real intimacy. I like how the AIDS epidemic was the wake up call that these characters weren’t invincible and couldn’t ignore their gay identity. I liked the small explorations of how gay men can fetishizes their oppressors in order to cope and process, but it was so brief and should have been the main focus of James’s perspective. I liked how Tony and James’s stories intersected, but I was left feeling like I wanted more from it and this story as a whole. I think having more black and Jewish characters in both timelines would have elevated the story and given a full perspective while having someone who existed outside of this subculture and showing how it effected them and their lives. This small change would have been so much more interesting and given an opposing perspective that would give this look at a gay subculture so much more nuance and depth, but the writer doesn’t go there. I also think that we should have explored the darker corners of the gay neo-Nazi subculture, it would have given a fuller picture and shown us that for some men, this wasn’t just a style or a fetish. I’m surprised that I wanted to see more of the hate crimes from the beginning, but I ended up wanting to see how far these gay neo-Nazis would go in service of their beliefs, and I felt like the hate crimes in the beginning of the novel reflected more of young punks and adolescences using racism as a vehicle to take out their anger. In the end, this book felt like it never truly explored its subject matter outside of the main cast of characters, and I think that was a major missed opportunity, but other than that, I liked this book as a character study of two characters in the gay neo-Nazi subculture of London.