The Moralist

Rating:
Summary: A Torch in the Fireworks Factory
Review: "The Moralist" is the Stonewall of boy love. This book combines narrative, poetry, essay, bibliography, e-mail, and "how to" instruction in a Chef's salad in the tradition of Tristram Shandy. It is a long-overdue antidote to the toxic silence of the gay community in the face of the child-abuse sexual hysteria and "repressed memory" witch hunt of the 'eighties and early 'nineties. Author Rod Downey, like his fictional protagonist Red, is a sexual revolutionary. With "The Moralist," Downey tosses a torch into the fireworks factory. A work of courage but deeply disturbing, "The Moralist" can change lives, and so should with a warning label: Flammable: Handle with Care.

Rating:
Summary: One Hell Of A Read!
Review: Although I wasn't initially drawn to the man/boy subject matter of THE MORALIST, I decided to check it out on the recommendation of friends that it was a good read. They were right. Downey, with a wide-ranging mind and a large sense of humor, uses the gentle, even lyrical romance at the heart of the book as a prism through which he refracts (and often skewers) the customs, values, and assumptions of the culture at large. The often stream-of-consciousness technique roams across history, legalities, and aesthetics while alternating with intimate moments that have the feeling of a very personal reality. One of Downey's achievements is that you take away from the work an understanding of why the entire Greco-Roman world regarded this type of mentor/student relationship as both natural and mutually beneficial. In short, THE MORALIST, while always provocative, is one hell of a read!

Rating:
Summary: Great story, touching and emotionally charging. More please
Review: An excellent well crafted taboo love story in the face of modern day moral hyteria of boys under eighteen having sex and being loved and helped by older boys and men. Not the easiest read at first, but I couldn't put this book down after the first several chapters. The author correctly sets forth the current policical and legal climat within which the modern adult loving caregiver of a boy in emotional need of a heathly male role model, which is not abusive, is often brutally beaten down by society's moral right wing machine, most often without the adults peers coming to his defense.

Red, the adult main charater who loves boys, is the champion of his friends when he can no longer sit back and watch his benign boylover friends lives get destroyed one after another. He seemingly sacrifices his own life for the love of his friends and his moral belief that he and his friends are not the evil ones on the world and shouldn't be persecuted for their love and caring relationships with boys.

Jonathon, the beloved of Red, and Jonathon's family are seemingly very well adjuted and reasonable in their interatction with Red throughout the story. Jonathon's point of view as well as his parents is explored in varoius stages of Red and Jonathon's relationship. The author conveys the nominal sexual encounters between men and boys in the shadow of the more significant mentoring relationship, tastefully.

Red is the lucky boylover who isn't ultimately persecuted for his taboo relationship and coming to the public defense of his friends against the moral hysteria (witch-hunt). However, the author cleaverly tells his tale with increasing suspense until the happy ending is unfolded.

The story was real and true, evocing my emotions to the point that I cried after reading the last page, Jonathon's essay about his love and appreciation for the Red's non-abusive positive role in his live.

Bravo.


Rating:
Summary: A Book of Life!
Review: Even if I were to ignore the beautifully woven love story in The Moralist, it would rate highly among books with that unmistakeable touch of authenticity, unconventional wisdom and, yes, abiding truths. Downey gives you an introduction to various disciplines of philosophy in a down-to-earth, accessible and riveting manner, in making his case for Aesthetics as the foundation of Morality.

And the love story is as compelling and touching as any I've read!

Rating:
Summary: Surprising, funny and touching story of taboo love
Review: If you're expecting a shallow read about a pederast drooling over adolescent boys, you won't find any such thing in The Moralist. Red Rover is a master PR guru who volunteers for a creative writing program and ends up mentoring 12-year-old Jonathan. Far from being "dangerous" or "predatory," the love between Red and Jonathan is charming. The tale of Red Rover shuns popular tabloid hysteria and Red shows himself to be a caring and thoughtful individual.

In the book you will find a fast paced tale interwoven with startling insights into deep questions of love and morality. Red's take on these issues will leave you thinking. As you go through the chapters, you'll recognise faint glimpses of real life events like the Congressional condemnation of the infamous "Rind Report" and dozens of other things. Expect to be surprised! The character Red Rover can even be found in the book's pages working on his upcoming book, The Moralist, a "fictional autobiography." Reading this book is like stumbling through a room full of mirrors!

It is, of course, fiction. It pokes fun at media figures who should know better but take it upon themselves to "educate" people and comment on things they know nothing about. But it is also a serious story about a forbidden and taboo love.

If you think you know everything there is to know about adult-child or adult-adolescent relationships, The Moralist will change your mind. Promise yourself to read this novel. Not only is it funny and entertaining, it will also make you think.


Rating:
Summary: This book is so real it is destined to be burned!
Review: Looking for a transformative experience? Read this book! With his personage, Red Rover, who is a media guru, Rod Downey takes a simple approach to getting the message across: tell them what you're going to say, tell them, and then tell them what you've just told them. But it's how he accomplishes this simple task that makes the book so beautiful. There is *nothing* two dimensional about "The Moralist", from the description of a sunset, to the complicated love of man and boy, to the meaning of Life, Downey manages to put it all into terms that we can understand; he then makes it poetic, and finally, the most difficult task a writer can attempt to perform, he makes it real. He makes us believe, he makes us hungry for more!

This is a book for the straight, the queer, the mother, the father, the conservative, the liberal, the boy, and, yes, most important, the boylover. "The Moralist" dares to ask the question, what if? What if a man loved a boy? Not only does it ask that question, but it answers it. This is a book of realism, the America portrayed by Downey *is* the America of today. At last we have the long awaited "New Novel" of America! It should be enough to make Albert Camus salivate. Not only is it a book, it is a dare. Do you have what it takes to crack these 500 pages of pure thought?

Rating:
Summary: Speaking the Truth
Review: The Moralist by Rod Downey is the best boy-love novel I have read. Not only is the story line well done, but the novel provided me nine pages of typed notes. I enjoy it immensely when I can find quotes worth saving in a novel.

I have read The Asbestos Diary, the works of Kevin Esser, and many short stories with boy-love themes. I have read The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal and other gay themed works. The Moralist is by far my favorite novel in the gay/boy-love genre.

I have also read Loving Boys, vols I & II, by Dr. Edward Brongersma, Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine and Paedophilia, the Radical Case by Tom O'Carroll, among other nonfiction books dealing with intergenerational relationships. This novel, The Moralist, presents the truth about man/boy love, just as these nonfiction books do.

Rating:
Summary: Read it if you dare
Review: The Moralist for Amazon.com:

As solipsistic books go, this is as glabrous as it gets. And of course there can be no higher praise than that!

The Moralist is brilliant and outrageous. It is about things that matter: art, philosophy, politics, science, religion. Above all it is a love story, and one like no other. But be warned. Your settled notions of right and proper conduct could be blown sky high by this controversial oeuvre. Read it if you dare.

Rating:
Summary: Take 2: A more detailed review
Review: This book is subversive...
... only because love and true morality have come to be so in society. The Moralist is not so much about boy love (though there is much of that too) as about answering the question "On what should morality be based?". Hume and Locke demonstrated long ago that the good could never be based in pure reason. Downey, a true Romantic, argues that "the error of moral principle is that it's nothing more than cultural! bias." (This is Nietzsche taken to his logical conclusion, though he didn't himself, as Downey points out.) So, instead of doing the dubious "right thing", why not do (wink, wink!) the loving, the beautiful thing?

The Moralist tells a tremendously riveting story of an always erotic, though not always sexual, relationship between a man and a boy. And about the man's life. And the boy's. The moral struggle between good and evil, between self and society, is masterfully brought out in the tensions and travails that man and boy encounter on their brush with society. In less sexually-hysterical times, when the boundaries of love weren't so politically dictated, the quality of storytelling itself would have sufficed to make a compelling case for love and compassion as the only guideposts for morality-- even with their obvious pitfalls.

But Downey knows that he is fighting against the weight of centuries of a philosophic tradition, whose "dirty little! secret of moral principle is that all righteousness is self-righte ousness." So the 500-plus pages of The Moralist take you on a guided tour of not only Ethics but Epistemology, Sexology, and History!

The manner in which the author weaves philosophy into the storytelling is reminiscent of Pirisig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And like that great work, this book, oozing as it does with insight and challenge from every page, truly does have the power to change your life.

Of course, Downey would remind you of the Socratic maxim that the only true learning is remembering the forms we have forgotten. "If you want to be moral person," exhorts Downey, "don't ask what is the right thing to do. Instead, think back to when you were five years old and find out what made you feel good then; that is your true moral self."

Such simplicity in method will probably be dismissed by most moderns as mere cant. Ironically, that is perhaps why this book most needs to be read.

Others will question the author's wisdom expressed in statements such as "The moral struggle is not between good and evil, right and wrong, but self and society"! Society, after all, might be seen as merely "other individuals." But Downey's protagonist is no misanthrope. In pitching the battle as he does, Downey is merely averring the truth of how society-- that monolith that is much more (or less?) than the sum of its parts can rob one of
beauty, love, truth and ultimately, of self.

Wasn't is Einstein who said that there was nothing to be honored in the herd; that all that was noble and good and right was to be found in the individual?

Rating:
Summary: Well Done Rod Downey.
Review: Three Cheers! for Rod Downey. _The Moralist_ may be fiction however it is a true storey nonetheless. It is a real storey, happening all around us and right before our eyes.

Well Done Rod Downey.

But it is also a very scary storey. I've not completed it yet, I am almost afraid to for fear that just by reading it I will make it happen.

Gardyloo, ajo