John Boyne's 'Weight of Angels' reviewed: Oscar Wilde lives – and nothing catches fire

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What if Oscar Wilde had simply torn up the Marquess of Queensberry's card? John Boyne's new novel The Weight of Angels plays out exactly this thought experiment – and earns a harsh verdict in the Guardian: "sentimental and unconvincing".

Picture the scene briefly: 1895, four days after the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest. The Marquess of Queensberry leaves a card at Wilde's club that publicly insults him as a sodomite. In reality, Wilde sued for libel, lost, ended up in Reading Gaol and died just five years later at 46 in a Paris hotel. Boyne has him tear up the card – and opens the door to a second act in which the poet does not break.

The review's very first sentence makes clear how mixed the verdict is: "Imagining a second act for him is a great idea – but the results are sentimental and unconvincing." The premise pulls you in – the character doesn't.

Boyne redistributes Wilde's biography

The novel actually begins quite promisingly. Boyne spares Lord Alfred Douglas – Wilde's lover – the historically documented fate and simply redistributes the biographical details around, during and after Reading Gaol. The result, according to the reviewer, is a "cat-and-mouse game with the history it is reimagining". If you're into alternative history, that sounds like a feast.

Wilde's wife also dies early in the novel. This frees him not only from marriage but also from any moral weight that the historical Wilde carried with him. What emerges is no "tortured, scandal-haunted genius" but, in the reviewer's exact words, "a randy, wisecracking, party-going queen" – a horny, sarcastic party guest who trades bons mots with an endless list of celebrities.

What's missing in the novel: anger, wit, the linguistic fireworks

This is precisely where the critic sees the problem. The real Wilde showed in his late prose and journalism a "troubled and radical mind" that shaped the texts from prison and after. Boyne's version shows little of this, and the "subversive linguistic pyrotechnics" of The Importance of Being Earnest also hardly appear.

The upside of this is that Oscar gets to swap bons mots with a crowded cast list of celebrities; the downside is that he shows little sign of the troubled and radical mind that produced the real Wilde's late journalism and fiction, never mind the subversive linguistic pyrotechnics of The Importance.

What remains is a Wilde who tours illustrious parties and never reaches the depth that historically made him a cult figure. The hook is strong, the characters flat – as if someone had dissolved the Wildean paradox of genius and scandal before it could take effect.

A great idea, a lightweight novel

In the end, the verdict remains split. Boyne had the right instinct to give the "broken man" an alternative life. The execution, however, stays on the surface. The Weight of Angels is thus less a literary scandal than a missed opportunity – a novel about an Oscar Wilde who never became who he could have been.

Read on: The Guardian