Tip has been cursed by a witch to turn into a tortoise, mostly at inopportune times. He is tortoise-napped by a little old lady. Trying to escape her, he finds the most exquisite man ever who reads the same authors. Will he run when Tip turns into a human? Why was he tortoise-napped?

I enjoyed this short story. It was funny. I would like to see it developed into a longer tale or this be the prequel to a novel on Tip and Steve. It was sweet. Poor Tip! He is lost as to what happens to him and when. He knows the why. I liked Steve trying to reassure Tip as to why he was tortoist-napped. This story made me feel good and that's okay for a rainy day.

Hollinghurst's gay protagonist, Nick Guest, more or less ingenuously follows his sexual and aesthetic inclinations, which lead him, somewhat incongruously, into the house of Tory MP Gerald Fedden, the arms of a Lebanese millionaire's son, and finally personal disaster and tragedy. 

The thin thread that binds and shapes Nick's muddling way through his life is beauty, and his trajectory is in a way a test of its strength and worth. Hollinghurst holds up for us the thinness of beauty and the foolishness of its worship, yet when Nick's ostensibly hollow collaboration with shallow, materialistic, philistine Wani comes to unexpected glorious (but limited) fruition we are invited to reconsider. Beauty is a heartless god, the book admits, but impossible to deny. And sometimes those who struggle and suffer in its service are richly rewarded...

I've had a some discussions with an artist who believes that beauty is a concept that should not be applied to people at all. I said I can't deny the 'tingling in the spine' induced by beauty and she responded 'it's not anyone's purpose to make your spine tingle'. I totally agree with that - but I still can't stop my visceral response to and pleasure in beauty, whether I'm looking at a sunset or a person. The conversation prompted me to think hard about this, and to see how personal beauty being instrumentalised has a regressive effect, reinforcing hierarchies and layers of oppression. On the other hand, if beauty is visceral and inextricably related to positive identification and sympathy, we need to work hard to pull the encultured hierarchies from it. I'm thinking more now about dismantling the whiteness of beauty, the youthfulness and thinness of beauty, all of which are arbritrary and exist because they serve white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Decapitalise beauty! But I'm still working out how to frame this issue and how to reconstruct my appreciation. Here, structures of class and heterosexism pervade relationships, but Hollinghurst only offers them in the way Fitzgerald offers images of an unwholesome lifestyle he can't escape. There is little interrogation. And as in Fitzgerald, there's no redemption.

The characters here are delicately drawn, never rendered without colour and shade, and Nick himself shares his creator's insight and empathy for others. I had deep sympathy for this soul, and felt a mixture of admiration and disapproval!

Baldwin's drawing of characters and nuanced treatment of the topic is beautiful and striking. David, the protagonist, is unable to accept his sexuality and is constantly lamenting his compromised manhood, while his girlfriend has decided to give up her party lifestyle and settle for a stereotypical womanhood. Although their stated desires are perfect mirror images, they are unable to realise this lifeless, inculcated vision of contentment.

In contrast with the unimaginative couple, Giovanni is fiercely determined to seize life and love in their 'natural' forms, regardless of social norms. His openness and tenderness leave him exceptionally vulnerable, and the total disorder he lives in is the reservoir for the entropy of his inner suffering, a poisonous shell against the threat of cultural approbation.