Shameless

by Paul Burston

Martin is kind, decent, not bad on the eyes... and look where that's got him. His boyfriend of four years has run off with a male prostitute, and his friends John and Caroline both have enough excess baggage to fill a Louis Vuitton window display. What's a nice gay man to do? With no one to turn to, Martin decides to relive the wild youth he never had and, at the ripe old age of 32, jumps head-first into hedonism. But soon the nights of drugs, muscle-hard...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 044669133X
• ISBN13: 9780446691338
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Warner Books (NY)
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Drugs, More Drugs, Crab Lice and Prosthetic Devices

Paul Burston's SHAMELESS, set in London, gets off to a funny start-- you will smile at least once on every page for awhile-- but then sort of peters out. The characters almost to a person are no one you would want to spend an evening with. I found myself liking the two straight characters Caroline and Graham most. I'm not sure what that says about me or about the author. In the beginning of this novel Martin is a thirty-two year old who hasn't spent as much time in the gym as practically every other gay man he knows, but he soon gets started on those pecs. Just having been left by a lover he throws himself madly into the gym/drug/sex/bar circuit as he surrounds himself with a drug dealer, his woman friend Caroline, his airline attendant friend John, basically obnoxious-- for my money, one reference to men with feminine pronouns is one too many; if John called someone "daughter" one more time, I thought I would be physically ill-- and other assorted sillies who do drugs, drugs and more drugs. Some of these characters-- the action takes place in the now-- reminded me a little of those in Andrew Holleran's pre-AIDS novel DANCER FROM THE DANCE and Armistead Maupin's TALES OF THE CITY series. The difference, of course, at least regarding Maupin's characters, is that they are lovable, a term you wouldn't use to describe most of the cast here. When I goggled the author, I came across his list of favorite novels and found both of these two on that list. He also has the following quote: "I wanted to write the kind of novel I liked to read -- nothing too literary, quite light but with some serious points." Mr. Burston certainly has written something that we wouldn't by any stretch of the imagination classify as "literary." I'm not sure what serious points we are to take away from the novel unless it is that one really can OD on drugs if one puts nothing else into his body, that one should perhaps be a little more careful in choosing friends, that one should kick someone one picks up in a bar in the shins before taking him home in order to determine if he has an artifical limb and that one should make sure she deletes what she has written on her computer if it is something that her boss might fire her for if he read it. What ultimately saves this novel, in spite of its thin plot and characters you care not a whit about-- and makes it as good as it is-- is both Mr. Burston's considerable humor and his ability to capture the essence of the way a lot of people act, regardless of their sexual persuasion. For example, gay business owners who are always looking for ways to "give back" to the community. As a friend of mine says, that usually is a warning to you to grab your billfold. Gay men who spend most of their waking hours in gyms invariably have "great pumped-up upper bodies supported on tiny twiglet legs." (Just go to any big city mall even in the dead of winter and you will see these types, usually in tank tops, often with spaghetti straps, and shorts.

"You can never have enough coke!"

Martin, Caroline and John are the three central characters in this sly, irreverent, and totally contemporary farce that may leave some of the more conservative readers in shock. Their sex and drug fuelled escapades throughout inner city London are indeed "shameless" and their lives - full of soap-like drama - are without a doubt, hedonistic and almost dangerous. First published in England in 2001, Shameless is like a mini-gay expose on the lives of young, hip, urban groovers who obviously have lots of time on their hands. Author Paul Burston, with dead-on honesty and a cheeky wit, has his characters looking for love in all the wrong places while getting high on ecstasy, and coke, indulging in toilet sex, and contracting sexually transmitted diseases! Martin has recently split with his boyfriend Christopher. His vacuous friend John has been trying to get Martin to have fun out the fast-paced London gay scene. Martin is a nice down to earth guy, who is reasonably good looking and has a job that he likes. But when Christopher leaves him, Martin's financial security evaporates along with his emotional safely blanket, and he's forced to rely much more on John, Caroline and his new roommate Neil. It doesn't help that Martin has an activist father who wants to celebrate gay pride with him. With his new age philosophy, his hippy ways, and his modern ideas, Martin reacts to him with a fond mixture of affection and embarrassment. Caroline is Martin's best friend and confidant. She has a professional, high paying job, has a somewhat strained and awkward relationship with her mother, and recently suspects that her boyfriend, Graham might be gay. Caroline is also having a love affair with cocaine: "you can never have enough cocaine," she says merrily to Martin one night over dinner. Caroline and Martin's stories parallel throughout the narrative, as Martin hesitatingly gets caught up in the gay drug and party scene, and Caroline, sex starved and high on cocaine, turns to ex-boyfriends for sexual kicks. Of course, their escapades land them in all sorts of trouble as their paths gradually converge and they learn much from their experiences. John represents the selfish, devilish aspect of the story. A gay, gossipy flight attendant, or "trolley dolly," John spends his time chasing after men with gym-built bodies, who have money and lots of drugs. And while he pretends to confess love to Fernando, the Brazilian drug dealer, he is also cruising the Internet and hooking up with men whenever he can. John is the epitome of gay self-absorption, narcissism, and wickedness - and Burston captures his character perfectly. A person like John doesn't particularly give Martin the best advice, which is simply, to drown his sorrows in hedonism, and Martin, feeling kind of vulnerable, doesn't really stop to think whether John is the right person to take advice from. Much hilarity follows, particularly when Martin starts taking men home, and somewhat inadvertently, gets cau

HUMOROUS BUT DEFINATELY NOT GLAMOROUS

I have recently read SHAMELESS by Paul Burston. I think the book acurately documents the protagonist's, (Martin) journey into the wild and wickedly hedonistic world of club/drug culture, concluding with him managing to see the futility of the scene after being falsely lured in by the initial euphoria of the drugs. Some may accuse this book of glamorizing club-drug use, but I would have to disagree. Maybe it's just me, but I don't find someone's mistaking toenail shavings for coke and snorting it very glamorous, although I have to admit the author related the incident most humorously. I've been around more than enough to have known my fair share of characters like the ones in this book, and yes they were backstabbers and liars and cheats but they knew how to party and make you feel welcome. I know the special-tribe like lure of this scene quite well. I found the book honest and real, and I enjoyed how the author used humor to skewer, not glamorize, the entire scene.

Mad romp through the seven deadly sins

Although I'd like to claim that the liberal dousing of four-letter words in "Shameless" left me blushing, it didn't. On the other hand, if you find detailed and somewhat lurid descriptions of body parts and functions distasteful, you may not find this book as entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny as I did. All in all, reading this first novel by Paul Burston was rather like having an uninhibited, raucously humorous drama queen, who has no fear of using cliche-ridden narrative ("There is no Mr. Right...There is only Mr. Right Now"), relate the most recent dirt on mutual acquaintances. I had such a person in mind, and heard his voice throughout. If you haven't such an acquaintance, or can't imagine one, you might find Burston's narrative over the top and just a bit tedious -- but then, so is my uninhibited acquaintance.Martin, who "had always been considered fairly handsome (usually by straight women, admittedly)", is in his early thirties and believes he has an ideal life: a moderately well-paying job, a nice apartment and an attractive live-in boyfriend who shares expenses. One evening, Christopher, the live-in, does not show up for a dinner he had scheduled with Martin. After waiting awhile, Martin, thoroughly drunk, returns home to find that the dinner was a ruse to get him out of the house; Christopher is gone to live with his new love. With that, Martin's financial security evaporates, along with his emotional safety blanket. Martin's first impulse is to call his best friend, Caroline, "a professional woman, the only woman in her family to have carved out any kind of decent life for herself, and she had the fat salary, the company car and the platinum American Express card to prove it." Fat and unattractive through her teen years, she has had virtually every part of her body massaged, relaxed, beaten or surgically enhanced into shape. Fate intervenes, however, when Martin realizes that Caroline has probably gone to bed. Instead, he calls John, a gay flight attendant, or "trolly dolly" in gay parlance, whom Burston portrays as the epitome of gay self-absorption, and malice. Had Martin reached Caroline first, the story might have taken a different direction. As it is, in his depressed state, he is vulnerable to John's less-than-sage advice, which is simply, to drown his sorrows in hedonism. What follows is a mad romp through the seven deadly sins, with an emphasis on gluttony in the form of sex and drugs. Although Martin's plight is at the center of the story, Burston parallels it with Caroline's relationship with Graham, whom she suspects of being gay, and John's with Fernando, the Brazilian drug dealer. The three story-lines mingle, sit-com style: a medium-sized piece about one of the three main characters ends with a what-happens-then moment, and then switches to an episode with one of the other two. Burston uses a variety of writerly techniques to join the episodes, which help minimize the bumps that could easily detract from that