The Pharmacist

Reviews / Votes

"'There they are in the dark, men standing in circles ... while the rest of London goes about its business.' Much crucial action takes place in a club's toilets in Justin David's The Pharmacist, now republished as a standalone novella after having gained cult success when it was released digitally in 2014. It is here that the twenty-four-year-old artist Billy Monroe - the novel's narrator - finds himself with his lover Jamie, both 'dewy eyed and loose-limbed' on MDMA; only Billy is secretly seeing another man, one three times his age, the Polari-speaking drug dealer Albert Power - a louche veteran of the club scene, still in possession of a jawline reminiscent of Marlon Brando's. It is Albert - the pharmacist of the book's title - who first introduces Billy to ecstasy. Meeting by chance on a London street, Billy and Albert are instantly attracted to one another. 'Billy feels a knowledge pass between them ... the kind of cruisy look he only gets from young guys'. It is only later that Billy discovers that Albert is a neighbour in the block of Victorian maisonettes in Shoreditch where he lives. Their first encounter is described with a nuanced sensitivity, alive to the pathos of a vigorous and innocent young man beginning an affair with someone more experienced. When Billy asks Albert about his life, he's told: 'I am all your failed expectations in a man'. Yet the panama hat-wearing septuagenarian is more adventurous than his young lover. 'I've done some acting. Used to be a singer', he confesses. An eccentric and an aesthete, Albert tells Billy that his 'favourite authors are Genet and Proust, and that he never eats red meat on a Sunday and that he once had dinner with Dusty Springfield'. When Albert confesses to losing the love of his life after a thirty-year relationship, Billy begins to paint the man's portrait from Albert's description of him. When he unveils this picture for Albert, Albert's lies begin to unravel, leading to the book's tragic conclusion. A novella, as many great nineteenth-century European writers knew, is the perfect vehicle for depicting a love affair, and The Pharmacist's concise portrayal of Albert and Billy's doomed love recalls both Turgenev's First Love and Benjamin Constant's Adolphe. But the book is sharply contemporary. David has a painterly eye for the urban landscape of east London: 'Above the flats, a texture-less bruise of luminous grey-yellow spreads itself across the sky, like a patch of backlit vellum ... The cobblestones look like rivets in brown PVC'. The galleries, artists' studios and pre-gentrification pubs of Shoreditch are brought vividly to life. As lubricious as early Alan Hollinghurst, The Pharmacist is a welcome reissue from Inkandescent, and the perfect introduction to a singular voice in gay literature." - Jude Cook, The Times Literary Supplement