Library's review
Eventually Tom introduces her to his new friend Patrick, a somewhat older man who is a museum curator, to whom she takes an instinctive dislike though she tries to hide it. She is overjoyed when Tom finally proposes, and is only slightly put out when he chooses Patrick as his best man in lieu of Sylvie's husband. They go off for their honeymoon, and after a few days Patrick shows up to hang out with the newlyweds. Marion gets more signals that something is afoot, and eventually even she cannot deny that her beloved Tom is gay, and in love with Patrick.
The uneasy triangle continues for a few years, until one of the trio can't stand it anymore and does something that cannot be undone, changing all of their lives forever.
The structure of My Policeman is interesting. The first part is excerpts from a manuscript that Marion is writing many years after these events. It's 1999, Patrick is ill and has come to live with Tom and Marion. He is physically helpless and cannot speak, but Marion intends to read her manuscript aloud to Patrick. The second part consists of excerpts from Patrick's private journal, in which he details the instant attraction and growing relationship between himself and Tom — "my policeman," he affectionately calls him in the journal so as not to name names.
Marion's 1999 narration takes over again in the final part, which takes on new resonance now that we've gotten Patrick's side of the story. The only member of the triangle who remains virtually silent through the whole book is Tom, who has a few lines of dialogue in his lovers' narratives here and there but whose point of view we never get. I've spent a fair amount of time since I finished the book thinking about why Roberts chose to tell the story this way, but I'm still not sure I understand it. Perhaps she felt the main interest lies in the hands tugging the rope of Tom's affection from either side, and not so much how the rope feels about being pulled.
I don't think it's a spoiler to say there's no neat and happy ending here. I felt sorrow for all three of them, for various reasons, even when they behaved badly. In Patrick's journal, especially, it's wrenching to be reminded of just how perilous being gay in the 1950s could be (a reality that far too many people in the US would like to see return).
I listened to the audiobook , and while that format is not my favorite because my attention span is that of a flea, I thought the narrators (Emma Powell for Marion's segments and Piers Hampton for Patrick's) did a very good job.
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Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. LGBTQIA+ (Fiction.) HTML:Now a motion picture starring Harry Styles, Emma Corrin, and David Dawson, an exquisitely told, tragic tale of thwarted love. �??Stunning�?�fraught and honest.�?� �??New York Times Book Review It is in 1950's Brighton that Marion first catches sight of Tom. He teaches her to swim, gently guiding her through the water in the shadow of the city's famous pier and Marion is smitten�??determined her love alone will be enough for them both. A few years later near the Brighton Museum, Patrick meets Tom. Patrick is besotted, and opens Tom's eyes to a glamorous, sophisticated new world of art, travel, and beauty. Tom is their policeman, and in this age it is safer for him to marry Marion and meet Patrick in secret. The two lovers must share him, until one of them breaks and three lives are destroyed. In this evocative portrait of midcentury England, Bethan Roberts reimagines the real life relationship the novelist E. M. Forster had with a policeman, Bob Buckingham, and his wife. My Policeman is a deeply heartfelt story of love's passionate endurance, and the devastation wrought by a repr… (more)