Voice of Force

Is Increased Awareness of Sexuality and Difference Truly Helping Us Live More Harmonious Lives? Or Can It Lead to Tragedy?

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.

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