Crewe inhabits his two male protagonists in turn, writing from within their desires, and flanks them with compelling, contrasting figures who represent external judgment and demands. Addington’s wife is appalled by his self-destructive boldness, his willingness to drag his family’s name through the mire with a work like Sexual Inversion.

She is the old life, but she by no means plays the villain’s part in some ideological melodrama. She too is a victim, of Addington’s attempts to escape his homosexuality; her life has been blighted as surely as his. And Addington also faces disapproval from an old friend, a Cambridge don who has tried to marry away his homosexuality in pursuit of academic status.

Meanwhile, there is Edith’s lover Angelica, bolder than Addington, bolder than them all, given to loudly proclaiming her inversion within earshot of strangers: someone for whom the New Life cannot come fast enough.

Then, just as Sexual Inversion is published, decadence does indeed appear, with the Oscar Wilde scandal and its sordid tales of gay-for-pay teenagers. Besides or instead of sympathy, Addington and his friends are embarrassed and angered by Wilde’s indiscretions. (If a recent biography is anything to go by, the Wilde formerly known as a saint is starting to seem as much a predator as a martyr.) Sexual Inversion itself is dragged into court on obscenity charges, and its case histories, including Addington’s own, given in candour and good faith, are held up by the prosecutor as examples of filth.

The New Life is about sex, but then lots of novels are about sex. It also about political agency, about activism and agitation; about the fear of going too far or not going far enough, the lure and trap of what are now called respectability politics and trying to tailor one’s message and one’s being to mainstream sensibilities. It may be easier for inverts to pass than it is for other oppressed groups, but sexual radicalism has its own unique stakes.

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The novel is at its most haunting when Crewe shows how his characters run the risk not just of opposition, or even mockery, but contempt and loathing, and not just to society at large but the people closest to them. And how shame does oppression’s work for it.

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