Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya; The South by Tash Aw review – love under the eye of the law

Two contrasting but equally impressive Asia-set coming-of-age novels explore gay teenagers navigating their nascent sexuality against the backdrop of personal and political upheavals

What makes sex so natural a subject for fiction isn’t simply prurience, but rather the drama built into the evergreen question of how private desire finds expression, not least when the law’s looking. Two new novels, both set in Asia and centred on the coming of age of gay men, play out against the legacy of section 377, the Victorian penal code criminalising homosexuality in British colonies – repealed in 2018 in India, where Santanu Bhattacharya’s Deviants unfolds, and still applicable in Malaysia, the setting of Tash Aw’s The South, the first of a planned quartet from the two-time Booker longlistee.

Deviants, Bhattacharya’s second novel, hops with buttonholing vim around three gay men across three generations over the past half-century to draw surprising contrasts and continuities of experience amid legal and cultural change. The two earliest threads, which open in the 70s and 90s, tell of loneliness, shame, persecution. One protagonist, an artist, lives with the painful memory of a thrilling secret relationship that was snuffed out almost as soon as it began, with his lover, known only as X, curtly announcing his marriage. Another, a university student, falls in love with his university classmate only to be ostracised, with much worse to come.