‘Highly personal. Enormously readable. Intense love shines through.’ Peter Burton - Gay News
‘Closely observed. Sensitive. Highly entertaining.’ Oxford Times
By the time Angus Stewart wrote his first novel, 'Sandel’, which in 1968 dared to set love free between a 19-year-old undergraduate and a 13-year-old choirboy, he was already an habitué of Tangier. He first found it pirouetting across the globe with a pair of Woolworth’s compasses in his search for an alternative to orthodox western living. ‘Two weeks later I was installed in the haouma of Aïn Haiani, Tangier, with a camp bed, primus, saucepan, and a twelve-year-old boy from the jebilet.’
Stewart’s experience of Tangier helped shape all three of his novels. His illustrated memoir of those days - highly personal, sharply written and often wryly funny - is ‘a book rich in observation – most often about young Moroccan boys,’ as the gay critic Peter Burton writes. 'Perhaps the longest section in the book is the chapter about Meti, a boy Stewart met on a rainy night, took back to his small apartment where “Meti splashed in the bath, ate a large meal, and stayed four years”. Meti is but one of the boys whose presence brighten the pages of Tangier. Mr Stewart is at his best – as readers of Sandel will remember – when writing of these boys.’
But all is not as it seems. These boys bring Stewart what he wants, but are not sex objects. They take him into their homes, into their families to meet their parents and siblings. And he takes them into his heart, daring to look into the very soul of the innocent Tanjaouine, longing to define that something which they have, and we in the West have lost.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angus Stewart was born in 1936, the son of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, the novelist and Oxford academic who wrote bestselling crime fiction as Michael Innes. He was educated at Bryanston School in Dorset, and later at Christ Church Oxford. Stewart's first published work was ‘The Stile’ (1965), which won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize. His first novel, 'Sandel’, which is in many respects autobiographical, came in 1968 and is now a cult classic, recently commanding very high prices on the internet. Before and after its publication, Stewart lived for long periods in Morocco. In 2016 his personal memoir, ‘Tangier’ (1977), was reissued in a new edition, including photographs by the author. His experiences there explain a great deal about the author of 'Sandel’, and his exposure to Tangier’s legendary artistic community, which included Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Francis Bacon, Alan Sillitoe, Ruth Fainlight, Rupert Croft-Cooke, Alec Waugh, William Burroughs, Gavin Maxwell, Francis Bacon, Joe Orton and others, prepared the way for his second novel, ‘Snow in Harvest’ (1969). ‘Sense and Inconsequence: Satirical Verses’ followed in 1972, with a Foreword by W H Auden. A third novel, ‘The Wind Cries All Ways’, which includes a startling description of the author’s incarceration in a Tangier mental asylum, has yet to be published.
After his mother's death in 1979 Stewart returned to live in England, and died in Oxfordshire twenty years later.
‘Closely observed. Sensitive. Highly entertaining.’ Oxford Times
By the time Angus Stewart wrote his first novel, 'Sandel’, which in 1968 dared to set love free between a 19-year-old undergraduate and a 13-year-old choirboy, he was already an habitué of Tangier. He first found it pirouetting across the globe with a pair of Woolworth’s compasses in his search for an alternative to orthodox western living. ‘Two weeks later I was installed in the haouma of Aïn Haiani, Tangier, with a camp bed, primus, saucepan, and a twelve-year-old boy from the jebilet.’
Stewart’s experience of Tangier helped shape all three of his novels. His illustrated memoir of those days - highly personal, sharply written and often wryly funny - is ‘a book rich in observation – most often about young Moroccan boys,’ as the gay critic Peter Burton writes. 'Perhaps the longest section in the book is the chapter about Meti, a boy Stewart met on a rainy night, took back to his small apartment where “Meti splashed in the bath, ate a large meal, and stayed four years”. Meti is but one of the boys whose presence brighten the pages of Tangier. Mr Stewart is at his best – as readers of Sandel will remember – when writing of these boys.’
But all is not as it seems. These boys bring Stewart what he wants, but are not sex objects. They take him into their homes, into their families to meet their parents and siblings. And he takes them into his heart, daring to look into the very soul of the innocent Tanjaouine, longing to define that something which they have, and we in the West have lost.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angus Stewart was born in 1936, the son of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, the novelist and Oxford academic who wrote bestselling crime fiction as Michael Innes. He was educated at Bryanston School in Dorset, and later at Christ Church Oxford. Stewart's first published work was ‘The Stile’ (1965), which won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize. His first novel, 'Sandel’, which is in many respects autobiographical, came in 1968 and is now a cult classic, recently commanding very high prices on the internet. Before and after its publication, Stewart lived for long periods in Morocco. In 2016 his personal memoir, ‘Tangier’ (1977), was reissued in a new edition, including photographs by the author. His experiences there explain a great deal about the author of 'Sandel’, and his exposure to Tangier’s legendary artistic community, which included Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Francis Bacon, Alan Sillitoe, Ruth Fainlight, Rupert Croft-Cooke, Alec Waugh, William Burroughs, Gavin Maxwell, Francis Bacon, Joe Orton and others, prepared the way for his second novel, ‘Snow in Harvest’ (1969). ‘Sense and Inconsequence: Satirical Verses’ followed in 1972, with a Foreword by W H Auden. A third novel, ‘The Wind Cries All Ways’, which includes a startling description of the author’s incarceration in a Tangier mental asylum, has yet to be published.
After his mother's death in 1979 Stewart returned to live in England, and died in Oxfordshire twenty years later.
