Ralph: Diary of a Gay Teen

A powerful, moving book about Catholic school life on the cusp of the 1970s and of one talented boy’s exploration of his abilities, views emotions and sexuality, Ralph takes the form of a diary and a diary that could only have been written based on actual experience. That is its greatest strength for it is not a retrospective revisiting, and revising, of the past but Ralph’s day by day perception of his life and relationships, with mood swings, exaltation desperation and ordinary fed-upness, recorded as he experienced them. Ralph is a pupil at a Catholic school run by Benedictine monks, the same Catholic order that ran the different school I was at some five years earlier. Maybe the five-year gap in our respective ages was light years in terms of our different experiences, for Ralph and his friends experience an emotional and social life far removed from the strictness and strictures, ruled by corporal punishment, that I had experienced. What is common ground is the rather hot-house atmosphere, the person you are at school being different from the one you exhibit at home in the holidays, the intensity of feelings. Ralph and his contemporaries manage a form of Catholic atheism which is enviable in its lack of tortured self-doubt and recrimination. They also explore their sexuality in relationships that are both joyous and painful but without the baggage of guilt carried by so many of us who grew up Catholic and gay. Ralph’s diary covers his life from the age of 16 to 19, a time of growth in height, knowledge, intellectual discipline and emotional experience. It is a roller coaster of ups and downs, often funny, quite often sad, but always intriguing. Ralph comes across as someone who aroused feelings of admiration, exasperation and affection among teachers and his fellow students. He engages you irresistibly as he navigates the highs and lows of his life. I defy your anxiety levels not to rise along with Ralph’s as he waits on tenterhooks to know whether he has secured his university place. And, above all, as he looks, as we all do, for happiness and contentment, as well as excitement, in his human relationships.

It took me a while to get into this, so I found it necessary to persevere. It’s probably worth noting that it is, quite literally, a diary, so it doesn’t really read like a conventional book. Important also to perhaps mention that the main character Ralph is providing commentary on his various experiences, issues, and assignations whilst at public school, so state educated people might not be able to fully identify with this kind of schooling, and especially the idea of being away from home and and parents for most of the year. I have read nearly all of the authors many other titles and, almost without exception, I have enjoyed his other works enormously. I’m sorry to say that this book (diary) didn’t really manage to hold my attention for long periods, as I found myself only able to dip into it for short bursts at a time. It therefore took me much longer than normal to get to the end however, get to the end I eventually did.

You're going to need to take your time with this one. Be patient; let it grow on you! If you do, you will be transported on a varied, often bewildering and always entertaining journey in to a young gay lad's mind way back in the 1960's. It's of more than just historical interest too. It's a fascinating read on so many levels and, by the end, you'll know and love Ralph. But ... stick with it and pay attention! This doesn't reveal all it's secrets all at once. Like a patchwork, the further back from it you stand, the more you see.

Gay in the title attracted my interest. However the book is a boring account of a school boy in an environment which hopefully no longer exists in the real world and where nothing much happened for page after page, after page. A complete waste of time .

Anthony Macdonald is a man of the theatre, and it shows in his novels: emphasising character and relationship and mellifluous language, and not afraid to employ sometimes improbable ‘deus ex machina’ plot twists to advance the characters’ development, he carries us out of a theatrical structure by the realism of his geographical descriptions and a powerfully convincing sense of place. ‘I’ve been there, that’s just how it is…’; ‘I’ve been in that situation, that’s just how it felt…’ are reactions he continually encourages, and thus capturing our attention, allows us to look deeply into the eyes of his characters while also seeing out through theirs. It is a remarkable gift, which he continues to explore in new ways. In Ralph he adopts a diary format, presented largely as the teenage Ralph wrote it in the late sixties and early seventies, covering his last years at school and first at university, with occasional comments from the adult Ralph as he re-reads the diary in the present day. The ‘fading tapestry’ of memory reveals some events as pivotal, but for others the significance is lost. The diary is a ‘slice of life’ offering us an almost stream-of-consciousness insight into the hero’s late teens, and as such, does not separate the life-changing from the mundane: as it is only in retrospect we can judge what really made us what we are. So the quality and quantity of institutional food feature frequently, alongside events, often painful, in the building and breaking of friendships. Ralph tends not to record those things which most move him: as he says, a diary is to record those things you would otherwise forget: falling in love is not one of them. So what is on the surface a very simple story proves in fact quite demanding, as we have to interpret what is really happening by reading between the lines, drawing perhaps on our own experience and on our experience of characters in Anthony’s other novels: for there is some correspondence. The setting in a Benedictine boarding school may seem a little exotic, and the quantity of alcohol consumed somewhat improbable, though it could be that fact is stranger than fiction here! Or it could be that Ralph is displaying a certain teenage exaggeration for effect. But as a literary device it adds colour to what could risk becoming a rather monochrome account of daily life, and so maintains our interest in the character. Who is Ralph? What became of him? We see him 40-odd years later, and we have a few hints in the last pages of love and loss in those hidden years. Maybe one day Anthony will fill in the gaps! Meanwhile, this is a magical book, which repays a second reading. There is much more to it than meets the eye. It is about growth, and about love; about risk, and vulnerability; about being human. A great read!

Yet another much to be recommended moving and percipient study of adolescent self-discovery from Anthony McDonald. As we know from his earlier "Adam" and "Dog in the Chapel", McDonald has an uncanny insight into the working of the adolescent mind Here is a boy searching for his identity, often his sexual identity and usually finding it where he least expected to, as with Adam and Sylvain. The descriptions of life in a late 1960's boarding school were only too real to some one who experienced the same thing in a 1940/50's context, though we would never have been allowed to smoke or visit the local pub! It was an interesting conceit to give us the boy's diary seen from a later perspective, we are not told exactly how much later, together with the inevitable spelling and grammatical howlers, these made it all so much more vivid. You could really see and hear them talking, arguing, experimenting as is boys' wont. I enjoyed too the descriptions of Ralph's daily encounters with his monkish teachers, all so very real. Life in that context has little changed, I suspect. Altogether a very satisfyingly emotional roller-coaster narrative written for once not in McDonald's elegant and lyrical prose, but in the words of a boy hopefully heading for university (yes, he gets there in the end, Durham, where better?), finding himself along the way and finally his sexual fulfilment in the arms of a fellow undergraduate. Much to be recommended.

A repetitive, and not very interesting account of life at an extremely improbable boarding school in 1960s England. I doubt many teachers, especially Monks, would have been quite so chummy an close to the pupils and drink copious amounts of alcohol with them.

a little confusing to follow unfortunately a Benedictine boarding school where all the older pupils seem to spend more time in the local pub ???? most unusual the 5 star is for the well written dialouge .

You need to realize that this book is a diary of a teen boy. The author Anthony McDonald has written many very enjoyable books. I have read all his books and now having read this diary I could see so many story sparkers. An example is the book Adam, he breaks his front teeth. That happens in real life in this book. In many of Anthony’s books, music plays a big part in the story. Music was big in the life of Ralph. I was told it would be a difficult read. It required a bit more concentration, but I really enjoyed it, mostly because I got to know Anthony McDonald even better. If this is your first Anthony McDonald book, read it and then pick up another one and you will find yourself reflecting back to this one and saying, oh, I see where the idea from this story came from. Read and enjoy.

As a writer he gets a 5, but my ignorance of the geography of English towns dulled my reading.

Good

There's a famous, oft-quoted bit of dialogue in the 1932 movie GRAND HOTEL: "People come and go. Nothing ever happens." That line describes this book perfectly. In the movie, of course, the line is a misnomer: a lot happens during the course of that grand story. But here - in RALPH - that observation evaluates this "slice-of-life" book amazingly well: nothing ever happens. In the end, I came away from this with nothing of value. From a technical standpoint, it's not badly written. I've read other titles by McDonald and enjoyed them (e.g., THE DOG IN THE CHAPEL). It's just that here, he and his characters have nothing substantive to say and nothing substantive to show us. There is little difference between one diary entry and the next diary entry. I kept hoping for something - anything - to grab my interest but it was not to be. Everyday it is the same: eating, going to the pub, the occasional class (this "story" took place at a very laid back school), getting drunk, groping, small talk, coming back to the school and staying up late with more small talk. Even the rare allusion to a [then] current event fails to make the vague and wandering story line "take hold." It's been only two weeks since I struggled through Ralph's "tale" and - in writing this review - I found I remembered almost none of it other than its dullness: NOT a good thing to take away from a book.

A real-life adventure! This is a bit of a departure from McDonald's usual novel format. It is, in fact, a diary, just as the subtitle indicates. I had the impression while reading this, of sneaking a peek at someone's actual diary. All the expected items are there: who I met, what time I had breakfast, when I skipped class, etc. Workaday, in the way that some items in a diary are. It is all the rest that keeps you coming back. I couldn't put it down! I am assured that this is what life is (or was) like in a real English boys' school. Sorry I missed it growing up!