Vanessa Thorpe in London
Opera director John Ramster has been paid an astonishing 250 000 advance for his first novel -which is about a gay man going straight.
Tackling the lucrative and voguish topic of relationships in a humorous and at times wilfully camp manner, the novel, Ladies’ Man, charts the progress of Simon, a thirtysomething travel agent who moves slowly but inexorably into a heterosexual involvement with his friend and former colleague Ruth.
Explicit in tone and full of contemporary cultural references, the novel goes straight to the parts many of the current spate of stories about love in the Nineties can’t reach.
Characters discuss oral sex techniques and in one passage a straight man who claims to have received a council grant for cunnilingus gives our hero what must be the most graphic literary description to date of how to locate a woman’s clitoris.
“It is an extremely funny book,” said Alison Menzies of Little, Brown, who will publish the book in July.
“It is rather satisfying,” said Ramster, who is in his early 30s. “Ihave already started a second book -perhaps a bit too quickly.”
Last year Ramster was surviving on a minimum wage, taking workshops of Glyndebourne opera productions to school audiences. He is soon to move into a grand new home in Brighton.