A decade after the publication of The Days of Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin returns to his beloved Tales of the City with a delectably satisfying new addition—the tenth book in the series—Mona of the Manor. Transporting us to Gloucestershire, England in 1993, we’re reunited with Mona in her late forties, ten years after she became Lady Roughhton as the not-so-blushing mail-order bride of Lord Teddy, who traded the Cotswolds for California, leaving the centuries-old Easley House in her hands. Since inheriting the estate upon Teddy’s AIDS-related death, Mona has continued to live there with her adorable 26-year-old adopted son Wilfred, whom we first encountered as Michael “Mouse” Tolliver’s ardent teenage admirer in Maupin’s 1984 novel Baby Cakes. The only other resident to be found bounding the halls is their affectionate retriever, Miss Vanilla Wafer, aka Nilla, also inherited due an AIDS-related death.
With bats nesting in the attic (who Mona turns to when she needs guidance) and a mischief of mice running around the Great Hall, to make ends meet Mona and Wilfred regularly take in paying guests, putting on a show to provide them with the full English manor house experience. Mona is a natural in the mother of the house role, like her grandmother before her, who proudly ran the Blue Moon Lodge brothel in Winnemucca, Nevada and, of course, Mona’s transgender parent, the landlady and majestic matriarch of San Francisco’s 28 Barbary Lane, Anna Madrigal.
As the novel opens, we journey to Easley with the Blaylocks, a conservative Christian couple visiting from North Carolina. Rhonda has brought along her best gowns to dress for dinner and is caught up in living her fantasy of staying in a real country house, as she tries her best to placate her curmudgeonly husband Ernie, who would rather have remained in the luxury of the Dorchester. He is a lawyer who put his own career on hold to run the reelection campaign of notoriously anti-gay Senator Jesse Helms (whom a young Maupin once worked for). Ernie’s continued admiration for Helms—who hasn’t shown him a shred of gratitude for his efforts—tells us just about all we need to know about him.
Just as Maupin enchanted us with the vividly evoked 28 Barbary Lane—a location that’s a character in itself if ever there was one—so here we get to fall in love with the rather dilapidated Easley House, as much as we do its endearingly imperfect inhabitants. In just a few words, Maupin gives such a tangible sense of the estate’s scale and layout. We can easily picture ourselves climbing the hill to the folly; strolling through the bluebell woods; relaxing in the minstrel’s gallery to eavesdrop on conversations in the Great Hall below as Wilfred does; exploring the chapel which has become a toolshed for the Easley’s long-serving widower gardener Mr Hargis; or taking in the ancient portraits that line the Cotswold stone walls of the house (which Mona makes up outlandish stories about to enthrall her guests, and entertain herself).
Since Mary Ann Singleton first arrived in San Francisco in the 70s, romantic intrigue has always been part of the fabric of the Tales stories. In the Cotswolds of the early 90s, Rhonda attempts to put on a brave face as she endures an increasingly challenging marriage, but the strain is beginning to show. While Mona and Wilfred’s rather isolated countryside existence sees them both single. Although Mona does enjoy the occasional dalliance with the younger Poppy, an artist and postmistress in a nearby village, and Wilfred looks for love, or a least a hot one-night-stand, on his occasional trips down to London. Might Mona’s friends-with-benefits relationship with Poppy evolve into something more? Could a visit to Easley from Wilfred’s frequent penpal Michael finally see things become physical between them?
There’s also an involving mystery strand to the plot that runs throughout, helping to give Mona of the Manor a thoroughly absorbing, unputdownable quality that has been in Tales’ DNA from its origins as a daily serial in The San Francisco Chronicle. Maupin’s skill for characterisation, ability to mix figures from disparate statuses, backgrounds, and ages, while delivering some social commentary in a riveting and entertaining read has rightly seen him compared to another celebrated author whose work was also published in serialised form, Charles Dickens. Maupin is a deft writer of engaging dialogue which helps us to feel intimate with his characters, as does the third-person authorial shift in perspective from chapter to chapter which contributes to this being such a lively read.
Maupin, who currently lives in the UK and had an English grandmother, clearly knows the country well and one of the delights of this book are the references to queer venues like the Coleherne in London’s Earl’s Court, where Wilfred and Michael hung out in the early 80s, and Love Muscle at the Fridge in Brixton, a popular gay club night that began in 1992. Then there’s the trifecta of Soho pubs that Wilfred frequents on his trips to London: Comptons, the Kings Arms, and the Admiral Duncan. Pubs that are thankfully all still pulling pints today. That heady atmosphere of expectation, walking down a bustling Old Compton Street on a Saturday night in the early 90s is brilliantly captured in the phrase “the air seemed ripe with the promise of unspilled seed”, as we accompany a horny Wilfred on a night on the town.
One of my favourite episodes sees Wilfred, who has not had any luck copping off in Soho, heading to the legendary London cruising spot of Hampstead Heath. There is some richly evocative and unapologetically graphic scene-setting, conjuring the alfresco ambience of arousal and sensuous pleasure among the “brotherhood of hungry, unsmiling strangers”. There is also plenty of humour, especially the detail of a volunteer from Gay Men Fighting AIDS (GMFA) being stationed at a candelabra-lit folding table close to the action on the Heath to offer condoms and lube (as Stephen Fry recalled doing in our interview with him). Wilfred also has a memorable encounter with an impressive penis attached to a major celebrity, who is cruising incognito in a wrestling mask. It is a fabulous and fitting tribute that the late artist in question would no doubt have been delighted with, and it echoes Mouse’s movie star encounter earlier in the series. That Maupin makes the book’s sex scenes so fun during an era of such darkness and fear feels powerfully intentional.
The setting is not one of rose-tinted nostalgia, but of a Britain at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis with Thatcher stoking homophobia (just as Helms was doing in the States) and enshrining it into law with her pernicious Section 28. With Mona and Michael having lost countless friends to AIDS, including his partner Jon, Mouse’s own future is worryingly uncertain as an HIV positive person in 1993. Transphobia rears its ugly head too, and as the creator of one of the world’s best-known and most-cherished trans characters in Anna Madrigal (indelibly portrayed on screen by the magnificent Olympia Dukakis), it feels fitting that Maupin would address it. When a character starts to fire off some of the very same talking points as the TERFs of today, Mona—someone you always want in your corner—is there to counter her transphobic views.
It is the acknowledgment of such realities that makes Maupin’s celebration of chosen family—”logical family” in Anna’s words—all the sweeter. After years of spending time with these characters on the page and screen, they genuinely feel like members of my own logical family, and it is an unbridled joy to be in their company again. Michael describes Anna accompanying him to England as “compounding the pleasure” of his trip in that it melds “old memories and new discoveries”, a sentiment that sums up my experience of reading Mona of the Manor; the bliss of revisiting these treasured characters in unfamiliar circumstances. Although this book is in conversation with the rest of the Tales series, it is never in a way that would lock out new readers, in fact it would prove to be a warm and inviting welcome, like one of Anna’s joints gifted to new residents of Barbary Lane. Poignant and moving at times, above all this a beautifully uplifting addition to the series.
By James Kleinmann
Mona of the Manor by Armistead Maupin will be published by Harper in the United States on March 5th, 2024 and is available for pre-order now. Please support your local queer-owned and independent bookstores. Mona of the Manor will also be available as an audiobook.