Absence

Written by a man about men, this book follows intelligent and educated men who struggle with their need for love and for close togetherness with boys and younger men. They drink and smoke and swear and ventilate politically improper views and display offensive attitudes. The writer serves provocative conditions and leaves the reader free to have his views.

In the shadow of the greatest filicide on earth, a brutal rape with full consent, the casual seduction of a blind-drunk youth in need for love, and the consented exploitation of the minors, give colour to a part of this book's narrative.

The reader is confronted with the ifs and buts and pros and cons of many sets of love, even felonious, in settings by the blue Aegean Sea, in the opulent abode of a Roman palace and in a sterile suburb by the icy Arctic Circle.

Young Simon scrammed the ice-cold north and found that hungry lads engulfed him with a love that only sought itself to please. When Jeffrey Smart, the artist from Australia, saw his sad and light-blue eyes in a temple late at night, he wanted him to be his boy for all his life. The boy then fell in love with very young Mich l; was that a virtuous summer fling or trace of a malicious decadence concealed behind the boy's innocuous face?

The boy claimed parents with a subtle form of negligence prepare their sons to be the loot of older and lascivious men, who once were children of a mother and a father preventing their son to develop and become a man.

Minor and major characters include the famous and successful Australian artist Jeffrey Smart, an eleven-year-old prostitute, a character-diffuse youngster, the president in a global petrol company, and an old retired naval surgeon from the Monarchy Australia.