John Boyne joins Tom’s Book Club to talk about his new novel, The Weight of Angels, an imaginative reworking of the life of Oscar Wilde that asks what might have happened if Wilde had made a different decision at a crucial moment in his life.
In February 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry left his infamous calling card at the Albemarle Club, accusing Wilde of being a “posing Somdomite”. Wilde chose to sue for libel, setting in motion the events that would lead to his arrest, imprisonment, public disgrace and eventual death in Paris.
But what if he had simply ignored the card?
In The Weight of Angels, John Boyne imagines an alternative life for Oscar Wilde — one in which he avoids the court case and lives on into the twentieth century, encountering figures including Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Emmeline Pankhurst and Rudyard Kipling.
In this conversation, John Boyne discusses the challenge of recreating Oscar Wilde’s distinctive voice, writing historical fiction, and how he decided which real people and events to bring into Wilde’s imagined life. He talks about Wilde’s wit, fatherhood, and the complicated relationship between writers and the literary world. Boyne also reflects on his own writing career and what he has learned about writing after decades as a novelist.
John Boyne is the author of 16 novels, including The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, the Elements Quartet and The Weight of Angels.
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