Summary
Continuing on from his efforts to get off of heroin in ‘Junky’, the now-soberish William Lee (Burroughs himself in all but surname) attempts to pursue a new kind of fix.
Lee pursues a sexual relationship with the attractive young man Eugene Allerton.
He fails.
Background
If ‘Junky’ was about addiction, then ‘Queer’ was trying to stay clean.
Starting life as the ending to the ‘Junky’ manuscript, the book reads partly as a sequel but works as a standalone piece in it’s own right.
Burroughs shot his wife in 1951 during a drunken attempt at re-enacting William Tell, finishing ‘Queer’ the following year.
Review
The introduction states that Burroughs’s grief from accidentally killing his wife is a key factor behind ‘Queer’ being shelved for thirty-three years.
Lee’s failing relationship with Allerton does form an interesting parallel to this event, and indeed becomes somewhat poignant in light of it.
I first read the book in an afternoon and it left me cold.
Maybe it was the third-person narration, the uneven tone or the generally unfinished feel of the book, but ‘Queer’ was as its name implied, an oddity. This awkward thing was neither as clinical as ‘Junky’ nor as shocking as ‘Naked Lunch’ and the ‘Cutup Trilogy’ or even as complete a narrative as the ‘Red Night’ trilogy.
What it does achieve is something nothing of those other books accomplish, it strips Burroughs-as-Lee down to his emotional core.
Under all the chess strategies and animal torture lies something pitiable.
There’s a painful void in the heart of the text that provides catharsis in perhaps its crudest form.
It’s pretty easy to dismiss Burroughs’s work as too disconnected from reality to enjoy. It was almost a year after getting ‘Naked Lunch’ before I felt I could get into it.
I regret that I didn’t begin with ‘Queer’.
By blending moments of genuine self-loathing and desire with one another, ‘Queer’ sets itself apart from the rest of Burroughs’s work although the frequent forays into madness (Lee casually talks about burning a pig alive and setting it loose in a restaurant as a novelty appetiser) keep it in line with his canon.
The way the narrative starts with disjointed images, congeals into something of a narrative and falls right back apart again is like witnessing an addict’s attempt to get clean and then relapsing in novel form.
Lee’s frequent moral lapses and Burroughs’s proclamation that he endured a “destruction of self-image” won’t make you like him, but if you read ‘Naked Lunch’ and wonder what kind of fucked-up individual could write the kind of stuff, ‘Queer’ will give you some sort of answer.
It’s also barely over a hundred pages even with all the introductions and added parts, so even if you don’t like it you won’t have wasted much time on it.
What happened next?
In 1984 a near-complete manuscript of ‘Queer’, then thought long-lost, was discovered and Burroughs agreed to its publication after being offered a lucrative deal on it and subsequent novels.
‘Queer’ is undoubtedly the most straightforwardly emotive of Burroughs’s works, providing a narrative that is as readable as ‘Junky’, but displays all the warning signs needed to foreshadow the impending madness of ‘Naked Lunch’.
Rating: 7/10
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