The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts
Behind the sensational headlines of Oscar Wilde’s affair with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas is Oscar’s family dealing with the fallout. This “novel in five acts” – a nod to Oscar’s playwriting career – opens in August 1892 with Act One when Oscar, his mother Lady Wilde, his wife Constance, and their sons Cyril and Vyvyan are holidaying in the Norfolk countryside. Oscar’s friend, the childlike and flamboyant Bosie, joins them. Oscar, a loving and devoted husband and father, and Constance no longer share a bed, but their family life is a source of happiness and contentment for both. Initially, Constance doesn’t pick up on the subtle clues of what is happening between her husband and Bosie, but gradually she begins to put the pieces together, and the foundations of her world begin to falter.
Act Two finds Constance and her sons at a seaside village in Italy five years later, after Oscar’s imprisonment for sodomy and indecency. We look back at the sordid publicity the family endured during and after Oscar’s libel and criminal trials. Act Three focuses on Cyril during WWI and Act Four on Vyvyan after the Great War, both coming to terms with the father they loved and the man pilloried by the world. Returning to the Norfolk countryside of 1892 for Act Five, the family is determined to hold together in the affair’s aftermath, but, as we know, society and the law have a different agenda.
Bayard’s dialogue is witty and lively. His writing infuses the characters’ emotions into the reader, and you become, not a bystander, but a part of Constance’s life, living the implosion of her happy life and feeling her pain. And Oscar who, placed in a different time, wouldn’t have been destroyed this way will make your heart break. This is unarguably one of Bayard’s best novels and a must read.
