Kissing the Rod: A Novel. (vol. 1 of 3)
1866
Robert Streightley has built a life on numbers. As a money-broker in 1860s London, he thrives on precision, discipline, and the clean certainty of ledgers. Then Katharine Guyon walks into his office to beg for time on her father's debt, and something dormant awakens in him - something he has no ledger to account for. Yates captures the exquisite torture of a man for whom feeling is an alien country: watching Katharine move through the world with easy grace, laughing with other men (the handsome Gordon Frere, no less), while he sits trapped in his own inadequacy, calculating odds he cannot change. The novel is sharpest when examining the peculiar cruelty of class - Robert has money, but not the social currency that would let him speak. London hums around them both, its routines indifferent to the private anguish of people who cannot say what they mean. Volume One establishes a central question that haunts the rest: can a man who has never needed anyone learn to need someone without losing himself entirely? For readers who savor the slow burn of unrequited longing rendered with psychological precision.
