Voice of Force

Synopsis of VOICE OF FORCE:

Two men with two different desires. Or two predators out to satiate opposing but equally potent drives. When the lusts for sex and power collide, can friendship even be possible? And when two such men do find mutual ground, can they withstand the interests of those who would put family, faith, profits, and politics between them?

Newspaper critic Ragland Hughes is openly gay. Opera tenor Cosimo Fratangelo is famously straight. No one gay or straight says a word as they watch the men’s relationship evolve from professional association to loving friendship—so long as both men remain alive and profitable.

When the body of one of the men washes ashore off Long Island Sound, convulsive testimony indicts the survivor as the prosecution’s lone suspect. The media melee that ensues not only casts unwelcome light on the forces keeping a gay man and a straight man from enjoying friendship, it brands Hughes a predator of heterosexual men and Fratangelo a sociopath driven by ambition. As for the disparate voices having their say in the two men’s lives, sexuality is to be defined and judged as something much more than genital union.

Part thwarted love story, part cautionary tale, part philosophical rant, VOICE OF FORCE sounds out the deep divide of sexual difference running through even the most liberal of enclaves. With Destiny seen as neither predestined path nor consequence of human choice but the balance of submission and resistance to the history bearing down on us, a simple criminal case is made a microcosm of ancient familial fear. We know a murder has been committed but in the end we’re left deciphering what the larger crime is and how long it’s been in the making.

Reviews of Voice of Force online:

"Voice of Force" is a compilation of documents: part journal, part news clipping, part opera libretto, part audio transcript and includes a short story that is a real gem woven into the novel. Moving seamlessly through these various forms the novel gives a strange coherence to the way in which our lives are archived and understood at the opening of the twenty-first century. Part love story and part thriller, the novel leads us smoothly through these transitions and we are deftly transported into the realm of obsessive love and desire.

The story begins with discovery by Ragland Hughes, an opera critic, of a young singer at the start of his career. From the first moment we watch the elaboration of what becomes an obsession with the young singer whose career Hughes is in a position to launch and mold until it is self-sustaining and his help is no longer needed. Throughout the story we are privy to the inner world of Hughes - both his passions about art and art history, about travel and place, but above all opera and his young opera star.

The over-arching question posed by the novel is what to make of a homosexual man's love and friendship with a man who is straight. To Denson's credit he does not give us two innocents to contemplate. We have the character of Ragland Hughes, a gay man and opera critic and we have a young, straight, rising Italian opera star - Cosimo Fratangelo. We follow the development of this relationship through the eyes of Ragland Hughes via his journals and later through the eyes of many of his and Fratengelo's acquaintances in the form of documents and audio tapes. The book gives us over and over glimpses into the powerlessness felt in all forms of unrequited love. We are lead through the mounting tension of desire developing in Hughes as he moves closer to a place still largely taboo in the culture and still discussed in hushed tones. Added to that we have known from the opening page of the book that there has been a murder.

The book creates an entire world, in the way that 19th century novels do - a world that is convincing and beautifully written. We begin to miss it before the last pages unfold.

Susan Silas, Amazon.com

Is Increased Awareness of Sexuality and Difference Truly Helping Us Live More Harmonious Lives?

“ Voice of Force” in essence asks some simple questions: Has increased awareness of sexuality and difference truly helped us live more harmonious lives? Or has it merely compelled people to mask the prejudice they inherit from traditions and institutions beneath a civilized veneer?

Increasing tolerance may have softened the fault lines of social prejudice, but Denson suggests that when a public tragedy draws out the voices of discontent, we learn just how deeply homophobia still shapes and enforces everyday life in even the most liberal of enclaves. The story concerns two men, famously straight opera tenor Cosimo Fratangelo and an openly gay newspaper critic Ragland Hughes. A beautifully written, sometimes ecstatic and mystical memoir draws us in on the relationship that evolves into a naked and raw exposition on two very different kinds of obsession. Then, suddenly, the memoir ends and the entire format of the novel changes.

Without showing us a single criminal act, author Roger Denson chronicles what happens before and after one of the two protagonists is killed. Thankfully we aren't led through the investigation or trial of the accused man. Clearly this isn't a crime drama or suspensful who dunnit. Instead, we are presented newspaper articles to represent the media melee that bring to light the forces keeping a gay man and a straight man from enjoying friendship. While flirting with the popular fixation on crime dramas, soap operas, and celebrity scandals, the novel penetrates deep beneath such genres to trace the fault lines of a relationship cutting against conventions, identities and institutions defining who we believe ourselves to be.

Half way through, the format changes again. We are presented a short story and an opera libretto--both extraordinarily stylized--that provide insight into the accused man's psyche. Another format change and we are transported years later to a series of death row monologues and conversations, some of them confessions, others rants, all of them psychologically raw and revealing of the prejudice driving the characters.

In tracing the characters' mind swing between depravity and mysticism, author G. Roger Denson abandons the novelist's godlike prerogative of "seeing all." In its far reaching and philosophical scope, Voice of Force is a reflection on how an individual is judged according to the resistance he puts up to the forces bearing down on his life. As the promotional copy on the back of the novel proclaims: "A murder has been committed, but the judgment lies in deciding what the true crime is and how long it's been in the making." I would answer that, based on the material presented, that crime has been in the making for millions of years.

Phillip Anachor, Barnes & Noble

Here are some excerpts from VOICE OF FORCE:

I realized as we talked that Cosimo’s disarming sweetness was in fact a multi-layered mannerism, one he must have cultivated over years of study (not with any teacher, but intuitively from the time he was a child). As he became more disarming, he operated at an ever-deepening level of unconscious persuasion, lulling me like a drug, freeing me of the defensive and incredulous mind I usually inhabit. Then, as I felt that impulse that always creeps up when I’m with compelling straight men (he showed interest in more than a few of the women nearby), I told myself I couldn’t dwell on it for an instant. I wouldn't let the past repeat itself. Instead, I buried all desire, losing myself in Cosimo’s broken English—which, with some wine, became even more pleasingly cadenced, even songlike. (Page 11)

When I could finally look his way, I knew instantly that Cosimo had never healed from the wound inflicted by this confrontation of sea, sky, and shore, and I could see from his face and the way his hands gripped the rail that its full meaning was resurrecting in his mind with all its primal force. He became visibly exuberant in reuniting with the huge, ambient essence that had fashioned him, and I realized that his sea, and his sea alone, must seem exactly as it did when he was a boy. Now I know what I hear in his great voice is the sea itself surging forward in all its grandeur, and how could it be otherwise? How else could he embrace the gaping expanse before us? How else could he be heard over the roar of this surf but by forging a voice of resounding bronze? (Page 56)

How can anyone who spent his adult life in the business of opera think for a moment that a singer onstage could be singing to him? Yet the opposite question was now posed to me—how could Cosimo not be singing to me alone—this question seemed for once the less absurd. Aren’t I the man who made Cosimo love another man? Who makes him, even in his atheism, wrestle with the mythology of Catholic sin. Isn’t that why I saw him up there, before everyone, indicting me for having cost him all? No. It’s just a performance. That’s what he excels at—not honest displays. That’s why he can get his charge across to me in the middle of such a devastating scene. And yet why do I, who never believed in damnation, let alone a power that can damn, why have I become so willing to receive his incrimination? No, this is more than a performance. Art alone doesn’t change minds or hearts like this. (Page 140)

Between waking and sleeping on the train I saw a door to my past open. Suddenly I found myself peering at the face of the man I'd not seen in a decade, a face I had at one time feared and revered. I must have gone into shock. I don’t think I was asleep. I remember only emerging from a vacancy when I saw Cosimo staring at me from Ethan’s place—the seat across the aisle, indicting me as only he can.
“You look like you wish someone dead.” Even when I remain silent Cosimo knows what I think. But even more perplexing is what I next blurted out. For they were words that never before had conscious thoughts affixed to them.
“He is already dead. And though it's many years after it happened, I still hate him. There’s no reason I should hate him anymore. He died quite violently. Drowned, actually. You would think his misfortune would've lessened my hate, if not dissipated it completely.”
“So, you wished him to die.”
“What?” I said. “Wished it?”
“And you hated him so much you wished him to die violently.” He was inside me now. Cosimo had reached my dark core.
“What?! No!”
“You did. That is why you still hate him. Because he made you hate yourself for wishing it while he was still alive.” Just like that he said it all, leaving me nothing more to discover or admit. And all I could do was look out my window at the passing scenery. (Page 76)

"Mirella a girl?" Cosimo laughed a laugh I never heard from him before. "Mirella has not been a girl since she was eight," he said. "No, already by eight she was a woman ... a woman with a quiet fury growing in her. I mean you know nothing about the closeness of a poor family ... a family in a small house. That is why I know so much about little girls," he said. "I know that's when they tell their first lies to boys. When they tell their first lies to brothers ... to fathers. Lies about brothers and fathers. That's when they first imagine themselves to be women. But because the world still sees them as little girls, they have to devise a special means to get what they want. They've seen the big girls get what they want using sex, but they know that will not work for them. It only gets them resented, punished, compromised. Rather than reveal their secret prematurely, they learn to use means that have no name ... no word to describe them ... at least none that I'm aware of. Not even the great psychoanalysts have put their fingers on it, Rags." (Page 92)

"I should say immediately that it wasn't an electric light he saw, nor a candle flickering. It was an inner light, that of a spirit, and it shone from a man sitting alone, low in a corner. Although he was beautiful and young, the man looked miserable. His eyes didn't look out, though there were hundreds of people at the party to look at. He spoke to no one and barely moved except to nod his head automatically to the jazz riffs playing loudly. Yet, unconsciously, somehow, he'd shone a beacon to the man watching him, and from the start the pattern was set. One man watched the other: the one who shone a light and the one who watched it from the shadows. (Page 165)

“When he first came to me to compose the music for Cain and Abel, Ragland said, “Gabriel, compose music that shows the beauty of the first brothers. But you must also compose it to show their ugliness, their humanity. Compose music that shows the intensity and complexity of the first brothers’ love, but also the fear and rivalry that love instilled in them. Perhaps I should tell you. In his libretto, Cain not only kills Abel. He rapes him.” (Page 326)

“In today’s world a gay man and a straight man should be able to become steadfast partners and friends. Right? And when their international success is trumpeted around the world, they’ve proven that the sexuality that interminably threatens to separate them can be made to lie forever dormant. Right?” (Page 107)

“Give me some credit. There was a lot I didn’t tell them. A lot that could be misconstrued. I could have told them about that damn club you once belonged to. Oh … you think it was a perfectly respectable organization … but under the circumstances… The prosecutor? The jury? Would they think it? Its name alone…‘Buddies!’ Really. A bunch of predatory faggots who get together to voice their obsessive lust for straight men? Oh … we had this conversation before, didn’t we. I was defending myself when you accused me … I said, ‘I don’t hate straight men.’ And you said, ‘You just hate it when gay men love them.’” (Page 319)

“Those women … they were prostitutes. Cosimo hired prostitutes just to torture his sister … prancing them around in front of her. At least they were fully clothed ... or I should say … clothed as fully as he cared for them to be. But I know he never slept with them … never went near them when his sister wasn’t around. I know this because of how old they were. I mean … well … they weren’t girls anymore. Cosimo really loved girls. Young girls. I often wondered if that wasn’t because of his sister somehow.” (Page 286)

"But I witnessed enough of the war waged between father and son to see that though Cosimo and his father sought to kill one another off by blackening out the pictures of the past they saw before their eyes ... I could also see that they blackened them out because they were so susceptible to their memories ... memories of what could only have been a deep love and admiration they once felt for one another. Whatever accounts for the murdering spirit that came to fill that room, it couldn't make them forget their love. What do you think could have come between them that way? What could have posed such a threat to father and son?" (Page 342)

“I'll stop, Lucinda. But only after you admit that the origin of male power is found in men's self-denial. All of history is little more than the story of men being kept from finding male love. It's unfortunate that the cost of women's happiness is the breeding of crime and war that flourishes in the frustration of male gratification. But if not for these afflictions ... women would have to forfeit men altogether ... and it seems that only a fraction have so far learned they can stomach it..” (Page 347)

“Rags, you know as well as we do. Consumers … they’re driven by unconscious needs and desires … unconscious associations with products, brands, celebrities. But Cosimo … he was breaking code. You seriously don’t think we should have let the world know what was going on between you. The way we were marketing Cosimo … we were fulfilling a need. That’s all. It was nothing against you. We’re not homophobes. But … we could have lost our pants with all those rumors. Cosimo had everything else going for him. He just had to be brought up to code.” (Page 315)

“Cosimo could have been any age ... he would still have become my son somehow. Do you understand? No, of course you don't. How could you? Mothers and wives ... we keep it all secret from you. Husbands ... they are our sons. Sons ... they are our husbands. The lies we tell you may vary with your age and your role. But the lies ... they're all designed to console you ... and to keep you.” (Page 304)

“I was prepared for this silence of yours. I have seen it with condemned men before. I could interpret a silence like yours to be pregnant with conceit: A man gloating in the power he has over those who remain obsessed with his guilt … his power over a silly priest clamoring for a confession in the name of a God he does not believe in. No … you do not seem to me to be a conceited man. I can see Our Lord in you too clearly. He too was silent in the days of his persecution.” (Page 362)

“Procreation is no trick, Mr. Hughes. It is a creative force. Those who bring life into the world are vital…”
“And those who secure life’s essential balance, Stefano ... they are crucial.”
“How do homosexuals secure the species, Mr. Hughes. I mean as sexual beings?”
“We preserve the species, Stefano. We are conservation realized. We provide nature’s … restraint on … your sexual … your procreative extravagance. We keep your production from becoming … overproduction … pollution … destruction … unbridled. We keep you from becoming an obscene cosmic joke.” (Page 364)

“Cosimo was to then learn why there is so much hate in the world. How else is it we are able to move on this earth with so much love weighing us down? Love is too filling for life. It stops us from doing everything we need to do to survive ... to evolve. We must learn to hate just so we can move even a little bit. So we can achieve. So we can live. As he realized this, Cosimo also understood that even his fear had a purpose.” (Page 384)

“I read that story you wrote, Rags. I know that because your stalker is obsessed with beauty … he can’t see the ugliness he is creating to possess it. And because your Cain is blinded by the tradition and ritual that’s been handed him … he can’t see the beauty of the things outside them. You were trying to tell us … you showed us that whatever goodness and beauty come with civilization … they must proceed from the remains of its crimes as much as from its virtues ... that both grow out of our blindness to them. That’s why the beautiful and the ugly … the good and the evil … that’s why they coexist. And in turn … that’s why we don’t know where to begin looking for truth and beauty. They are always transforming … without our notice.” (Page 359)