So to learn his back story is fascinating - he is seduced by a handsome bodybuilding friend of his brother’s, turns down money for sex with a toff, and develops a self-accepting sense of his desires and also his own self-worth. Alec Scudder was always the most refreshing character in Maurice compared with the constrained and tormented upper class characters. This scene is recreated here (even with some of Forster’s own dialogue) but retold from Alec’s point of view, so we get a rawer sense of how very daring and risky this act was. But from the point of view of Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper servant who daringly climbed a ladder into the bedroom of wealthy stockbroker Maurice Hall for a sexual tryst. 'What an inspired idea! American playwright - and now novelist - William di Canzio has written what is in essence a sequel to E.M. Hardback Published 22 July 2021 352 pages With the hindsight of a century, di Canzio imagines a future for them and a past for Alec-a young villager possessed of remarkable passion and self-knowledge.Īlec continues Forster’s project of telling stories that are part of “a great unrecorded history.” Di Canzio’s debut novel is a love story of epic proportions, at once classic and boldly new. Forster, who tried to write an epilogue about the future of his characters, was stymied by the radical change that the Great War brought to their world.

Forster’s secret novel of a happy same-sex love affair, tells the story of Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper Maurice Hall falls in love with in Forster’s classic, published only after the author's death.ĭi Canzio follows their story past the end of Maurice to the front lines of battle in World War I and beyond. William di Canzio’s Alec, inspired by Maurice, E.

William di canzio alec