SOURCE: “Coexistences,” in New Statesman & Society, August 23, 1991, p. 19.

In the following review of Secret Lives: Three Novellas, Binding praises King's title novella for its portrayal of characters carrying burdensome secrets and of a man dying of AIDS.

In conversation with Professor Barbara Hardy for the European Gay Review, Francis King observed that the novella “is not an English genre. It was developed in France and Russia as a concentrated form for narratives of sexual passion.” He cites Prevost's Manon Lascaut and Turgenev's First Love. Now he has followed his own masterly contribution to this un-English genre Frozen Music, with Secret Lives, the title-novella of a triptych, the other two being by Tom Wakefield and Patrick Gale, both already known for their explorations of the heart.

King's title suggests the theme that gives the book its unity: the intimacy, more properly the secrecy, consequent on obsessive passion. For passion...