With this, the last, we say goodbye to our British gay disasters, Oliver and Luc. It’s been six (6!) years since we first met them in Boyfriend Material, which remains one of my favorite books despite its flaws (which are, mostly, because they are about flawed characters). In the middle there we had Husband Material, which tried to do that rare thing: talk about what happens after HEA, with middling results. And now, the final stage: fatherhood, and what that means for two complicated gay men in central London with complicated friends who are all themselves going through similar life stages and unable to be fully at the beck and call of their messy friends.
First, a whistlestop tour through Luc and Oliver’s life:
– in Boyfriend Material, Luc is the C-list celebrity child of two B-list musical celebrities, whose gossip mag antics (not all his fault!) are about to get him fired from the only job that will have him, a charity for the preservation of a type of dung beetle that are vital to the health of the British and world ecosystem. The solution is, of course, a fake relationship with the straitlaced, perfect Oliver. While the romantic antics are delightful, the book sneaks up on you with 1) truly delightful friendship dynamics, written in a way that I still marvel over years later, 2) genuinely hilarious bits, usually around Luc’s work situation and Oliver’s dry wit, and 3) a real reckoning about what it means to be gay in a modern world that insists everything is fine now yas Queen (confetti).
– in Husband Material (spoiler) Luc and Oliver have been together for a while, and in true Four Weddings and a Funeral style, their extended friend group has started taking those Next Steps, and they decide they need to as well. Things do not go well. I still struggle with this novel, which tries to create hilarity out of two people who love one another but lack the ability to communicate in a healthy way. So yes, maybe it’s partially due to my mental space at the time, but the constant friction of Luc and Oliver doing all the same things and expecting different outcomes was exhausting as opposed to charming. In a neat twist, the book ends with both of them realizing that they aren’t actually interested in the institution of marriage as much as being together. Some kudos for Oliver maintaining that one doesn’t need to be into rainbows and drag and certain physical/style attributes to be a gay.
So now, Father Material. Luc and Oliver have been living together in sin (civil partnership) and keep having very pointed conversations about their forthcoming dog adoption that are, obviously, about potentially having a kid. As we would expect, Oliver is the one who is calmly moving forward with adulting, and Luc is a mild mess who thinks that it’s a good idea to meet his heavily pregnant best friend Brigid on Millenium Bridge at 2am when he’s spiralling about being a bad parent to the dog, by which he means he will be a bad parent to a child because his own parents are less than stellar examples of the genre. But that’s not to say that it’s back to being the Luc is a Mess show (my least favorite part of Husband Material)–Oliver has made strides, but he’s still overly judgmental both to himself and to others, and unwilling to deviate from a plan. But yes, I do think in general that Luc’s whole schtick annoys me more even though he is our POV character and written with great empathy because I am an Oliver in all relationships.
As Oliver says at one point when Luc immediately and correct self-analyzes why he did a mildly chaotic thing (and I’m paraphrasing because I cannot remember the actual words and my Kindle no longer syncs to the wifi so yay mild disengaging from the Amazon ecosystem boo inability to save highlights): I’d rather hoped we’d moved on from apologizing for doing the emotionally messy thing to, you know, not doing it in the first place.
I appreciated that Spud, their dog, gives Oliver a chance to fully and wholeheartedly understand that it’s not possible to always Order your way through life. Spud, the stand in for the baby that they eventually decide not to have, needs a combination of Luc’s warm, emotional touch and Oliver’s reliability. The practice is only mildly helpful for their actual experience being human fathers to a human, aka when they decide to foster older children who are moving towards reconciliation with their parents.
Look, I can’t speak to the verisimilitude (iykyk) of Luc and Oliver’s fostering experience. Jaz is obviously defensive and has her walls up, but she’s still help-able within the confines of a ~400 page novel. This is still romance (even if the series has moved much past the tropes of the traditional romance novel at this point), so there is still a positive ending for all the characters involved. But the journey there healed all the issues I had from Husband Material, and maybe even makes me think that that whole novel was just a psyop by Alexis Hall to get us to understand that couples can grow and change through some pretty shit middles to better ends? I felt so strongly that Luc and Oliver were trying to be better people and made each other better, which is what I want to feel after almost 1200 pages with the two of them. A strong end to the series.
