This pivotal moment leads Mathilda to successfully apply to an artist’s residency on a whim, located in a small European town where Hermia herself lived during the 1930s. This discovery is at once exhilarating and startling for Mathilda as it’s the first time she has seen a photograph of a Black person from the 1920s outside of colonial documentation. Until the day that she comes across a photo of the forgotten Black Scottish modernist poet, Hermia Druitt, at a party with Stephen Tennant, a prominent member of the Bright Young Things. While Mathilda is enamoured with their unabashed campness and decadent lifestyle, she is unable to identify with them because of her Blackness. LOTE’s protagonist is Mathilda Adamarola, a Black, queer, working-class woman who is fascinated by the Bright Young Things of 1920s London, a group of Bohemian aristocrats and socialites famous for embracing the wilful idleness and pacifist beliefs of the interwar years. The title, therefore, sets up one of the book’s central ideas, namely the radical pursuit of pleasure as a Black person. When I spoke to the author over Skype during confinement, they explained that this is one of many stories used as a cautionary tale to dispel notions of anti-idleness, a concept that is rooted in colonial discourse. Let’s spend a moment on the title: LOTE was a fictional, mystical society from the 1920s that followed the philosophy of the (fictional) Lotus Eaters, featured in Greek mythology, by organizing life around luxury, idleness and pleasure.
Initially drawn to the beautiful artwork and a fascinating plot outline, I got much more out of reading LOTE than I could ever have imagined. LOTE is the dazzling debut novel from Scottish author Shola Von Reinhold, which I came across by chance during lockdown.
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