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The Christening - Sebastian Shaw
ISBN 0-491-01823-1
Original Price £2.95
Published by W.H. Allen, London  1975
256 pages

From the dust jacket:
"Believing himself to be bisexual and too timid to find out by experiment, Miles Madgwick has recourse to his diary in which he pours out his most intimate thoughts.  Then he meets Alice and her young son, Rodney.  Attracted by both of them he comes to identify with Rodney, taking refuge in childhood's innocence.  Alice he sees both as a symbol of his own mother and as a woman for whom he can feel normal heterosexual love. But all his emotions are mixed, unable to be defined.

"Then one night Rodney stays with him and Miles takes the child home in the early hours of the morning.  The cab driver thinks Miles has corrupted the boy and, in a series of sadistic encounters, accuses him of being a pederast.  When Alice, tiring of her husband and seeing hope in Miles, asks him to he godfather to her new baby, the driver threatens exposure. What should Miles do?  If he refuses he will lose the intimacy that, for the first time, he as achieved with two people.  If he agrees he faces the horror of what the fanatical cab driver will do.

"In this tender, sensitive and blackly comic novel, Sebastian Shaw, the distinguished Shakespearean actor, explores areas of sexual and emotional encounter that are rarely seen and, unfortunately, too rarely understood."

One-word review by Crosscut Shaw
Woah.