REVIEW: Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter

Following on from two non-fiction works, What Artists Wear, and a lovingly researched assemblage docu-book on the Bloomsbury Set, fashion writer Charlie Porter ventures boldly into the laugh-cry landscape of queer auto-fiction.

At first I wondered if the Matrix was trolling me because my ex Elliot and I lived for years in the Scotia Building in Limehouse, and used to trawl the river at low tide mudlarking along its corrugated tidal walls - an image depicted on the book’s jacket. But maybe I’m just a quintessential gay London cliche. What’s more, the book’s jacket colour and font are just like Oxford House in Bethnal Green where I was working one day a week at the time … Creepy!

Handsome, modern, and carrying an all-essential Olivia Laing recommendation, Nova Scotia is an exciting, addictive, breathless new book that - after a few warm-up pages of cost-of-living crisis melancholy - plunges itself into the blue underworld of anonymous gay sex and graphic hook-ups, the short-lived, jaded, transactional kind that seem to plague older promiscuous men living in London today.

Charlie Porter’s years as an editor and critic come in useful as his narrator Johnny casts an all-absorbing eye over his urban surroundings, consuming people like junk food, embracing and ditching meaningful connections with the merciless severity of high fashion. But Nova Scotia is not entirely unflinching. Porter is careful to furnish his narrative with heartfelt observational details that reveal the emotional psychology of the Grindr diet and the ever-spinning micro-psychosis that comes with it as a side dish. Porter’s philosophy degree comes in handy too, lacing the book with welcome existential musings that entwine Nova Scotia’s main themes of lost love, found sex, and loneliness.

Occasional passages about gardening and modern nature bring a Jarman tone to the palette, offering a sage life belt to accidental Tate Modern gift shop readers, there’s at least one courgette harvest for every two rim jobs.

Porter’s fixation with housing, coffee and London’s “luxury” flat inferno pigeon hole him quite tidily as a hysterical millennial, although he is a purveyor of this mindset, being born himself somewhere in the midst of Abba.

Porter’s Gen X rosettes are also on display here, as Nova Scotia concerns itself with AIDS, activism and its nihilistic aftermath. Something intriguing about Porter’s vista is his ability to see two worlds with X Ray glasses, his own life falling across the turn of the century, he has an unenviable choice of victim cards to play - AIDS wards in one scene, blocked on Scruff the next - there’s something for everyone in Nova Scotia. Non-gay readers will find the book as enlightening as gay men will find it relatable, feeling a cyclone of FOMO and relief as they follow Johnny’s heartless sexapades across 200 pages.

Its ironic that in real life AIDS did, in fact, revive gay literature. It rescued the tired genre from the stench of cartoonish 1970s smut - crass paper backs that were unfinishable despite their brilliantly camp titles and collectible cover illustrations. AIDS created a burning important topic that a critical mass wanted and needed to both write and read about, especially in the absence of mainstream media support. Had AIDS not happened, queer literature - as we might call it today - would have fizzled out 50 years ago.

Nova Scotia gives us both the high-brow sentimentality of an AIDS book and the cum-and-spit joyride of a gay pulp story, making a bold two-pronged attack on the Clapham bedside table circuit - the holy grail of gay book sales. No Crouch End condo is complete without some gorgeous hardcore hardbacks wedged between the dying cheese plants. But Porter is no imposter in either micro—genre, he knows his subjects, his lived-experience chimes across the crushingly honest sex scenes. Only occasionally does the book trigger that “gay lit” QI Klaxon for me - “middle aged gay writer needs everyone to know that he has sex!” But perhaps that’s me being a jealous reader at home with tonsillitis (caused by a wild weekend in Barcelona - don’t worry guys, I’m getting some too! You should have seen that silicon ass last Thursday - muy calor!)

Reading Nova Scotia you feel this sense of just how much the author needs to get off his chest. Nova Scotia is a carnal war cry, an angry novel, and I did wonder while reading it if this book is an inventory of everything the author felt he couldn’t say over canapés at Somerset House and Harper’s Bazaar parties.

Perhaps the most interesting and unique aspect of Nova Scotia is Porter’s defiantly abridged approach to writing itself. Many books these days read like you’re just listening to someone talk at lunch - it’s quietly shocking how many published authors don’t actually do anything with their writing or seem to be even aware that they are practising an art form with limitless possibilities.

Porter’s first person narrrator is cool and modern, duplicitous and relentless, hard and soft (yes, in all senses). It’s reminiscent of Ian McEwen’s early day sociopathic narrators. Reading Nova Scotia can start to feel like losing at Tetris or Space Invaders as the incessant beaded structure keeps firing away at your eyes. This fast, ungrouted intensity is fascinating and enjoyable, albeit it a little spartan for some tastes (My own particular remedy for dealing with London’s hyper-sexed soulless insanity is to curl up on the sofa with Henry James - I’m running back into the hills of richly textured classics where TikTok can’t hurt me)

Nova Scotia is not a cosy novel by any measure, despite the cosy gift-market landscape of queer British publishing today. It’s a stylish, urgent, pissed-off novel, sugared with just enough dry humour to qualify it for the beach and perfect for a 90 minute flight. A bold fictional debut, the book’s strangely flagellating loveletter to Chariots is especially impactful and worth a purchase alone. Oh how we miss that syrupy late night swimming pool and those pale snoring towel-draped corpses. I can still taste the chlorine on his dick just thinking about it. I’m excited to see what Charlie writes next.

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