Reviews of Weekend by Martin Foreman

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WEEKEND
Third House, 1990

My first novel - and like many first novels, highly autobiographical. Names were changed, of course. Paris was originally Madrid and 'Gene' was originally a dancer. All three people on whom it was based have read it. One was complimentary; the other two - well, they did not complain and they did not sue.

I read it every couple of years and am surprised how well it stands up. Mark [the central figure] is unsufferable, but his emotions are very real. I am especially proud of two things - the long, flowing sentences and the way the narrative glides backwards and forwards in time.

to read an excerpt...

Gay Times (UK)
November 1990
Weekend, by Martin Foreman, is similarly* honest, though more subdued. Mark is a twenty-eight year old teacher with aspirations to becoming a singer/songwriter. During the course of the book he looks back at two previous relationships and a third, current affair, that may or may not lead anywhere. Being set in the past and the present, Foreman gives us a taste of both pre- and post-Aids sexual relationships. Located in London and, briefly, Paris, Weekend reads like the confessions of a best friend - being full of hope, insecurity and the need for stability. With detail that anyone who has had a same-sex relationship will recognise, this endearing novel looks at common experience without ever losing our interest.
Sebastian Beaumont

My first national review. Apart from the fact I wanted it to be longer and more prominent and to compare me favourably with Graham Greene and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I had no complaints.

* Beaumont precedes this paragraph with a review of Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana

Gay and Lesbian Humanist (UK)
Spring 1991

Wimp's Weekend
This is an interesting first novel by a young writer. It narrates the story of Mark Robertson, a 29-year-old schoolteacher and would be song-writer, as he reflects alone over a weekend on his past love-life. The interest comes from his experiences mainly with three very different lovers and their sex together. Many gay men will be able to identify similar situations and emotions from their own lives.

The different attitudes of Mark's lovers to their sex lives vary from an insistence on absolute monogamy through acceptance of other casual partners to promiscuity, but none of these satisfy him. He is not just self-centred, but a shallow wimp; not so much narrow-minded as unthinking. The result of his weekend ruminating is to accept himself as he is, and to approve the promiscuous life he sees as inevitably ahead of him, devoid of its former romantic aspirations.

Mark Robertson comes across clearly as no role model for romantics.
Roy Saich

Forget the fact that I wasn't young when the book was published and Mark was 28, not 29. The literary half of my brain was intrigued by Saich's definition of Mark's character, while the commercial half regretted the mixed messages that suggested the book was both interesting and boring.

Fiction by Martin Foreman

The first novel...