Previously posted on TheWildBoys.
Alexander’s Choice is set in the strange world of the English boarding school Eton, written by a self-confessed Old Etonian, operating under the pseudonym of ‘Edmund Marlowe’. Whether the former part of this moniker refers to sixteenth-century Faerie Queene poet Edmund Spenser, the latter appears to link directly to the Tamburlaine playwright Christopher Marlowe, he of the quote ‘all they who do not love tobacco and boys are fools’. For Alexander’s Choice follows the story of Alexander Aylmer, a beautiful blonde thirteen-year-old, who engages first in a homo-erotic friendship with another pupil and then, when he is fourteen, in a full-scale affair with one of his teachers.
As is emphasized by the title, Marlowe (as in Edmund) places significant stress on the fact that this sexual engagement is his boy protagonist’s choice to be made. The book claims on a certain level to be a defender of early pubescent sexuality and the right for all adolescents to wilfully indulge this urge should they have the chance.
