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Fly on a passenger plane over the mid-Atlantic states and more likely than not you will hear the pilot and/or the flight attendants refer to "Char-North" and "Char-South." The former refers to Charlotte, North Carolina, the latter to Charleston, South Carolina. Char-South is the primary setting for Edward Ball's PENINSULA OF LIES, an examination of the life and allegations of Gordon Langley Hall, who spent the latter portion of his life in notoriety as Dawn Langley Hall.
Hall, the son of a servant girl at Sissinghurst Castle in England, made his way to America and ultimately to New York City in his twenties. He became a biographical author of some renown and befriended a number of dowagers, one of whom left him a small, very comfortable fortune. Hall's windfall permitted him to buy and furnish a mansion in Charleston, South Carolina. As Ball notes near the end of this extremely well written work, Hall reinvented himself a number of times throughout his life, and his move to Charleston at the age of 40 in 1962 permitted him to slip into the role of the Southern gentleman and author.
Hall's world changed irrevocably, however, when in 1968 he underwent sex reassignment surgery and presented him/herself to Charleston, no longer as Gordon, but as Dawn Hall. It was Hall's contention, one that she put forth until her death in 2000, that the surgery had been corrective: she had been misidentified as a boy at birth. Hall's dramatic catharsis would have been enough at that place and time to give her a permanent notoriety. But she broke new ground when three months later and with much fanfare, she married a young black mechanic, decades her junior, subsequently presented herself as pregnant, and brought her daughter Natasha into the world. These circumstances heralded the beginning of the end of her fame and fortune and resulted in a slow but inevitable slide into notoriety.
The catalyst for PENINSULA OF LIES occurred when Ball was contacted by Hall in 1999 concerning a piece of antique furniture she had owned that had previously passed from Ball's family. Ball answered the letter and intended to follow up on the matter but failed to do so before Hall's passing. Ball was of course aware of who Hall was, but his missed opportunity to meet with her led him to wonder if, perhaps, Hall had an ulterior motive for contacting him, if she had perhaps wanted yet another sounding board for her story. Ball accordingly commenced the research of Hall's life.
That research, as much as what Ball discovered, forms the basis for PENINSULA OF LIES. His search for the truth, obscured not only by time but also by Hall's exaggerations, half-truths and outright misrepresentations, led him throughout Charleston, to London, California and back again. The result is an intriguing examination of a life lived half in daylight, half in twilight. Ball is an extremely interesting character in his own right, and his occasional, wonderfully snotty commentary concerning Charleston is not to be missed, even if one finds oneself wholly in disagreement with it.
Comparisons with MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL are inevitable but ultimately erroneous. Both books concern events in Southern cities making painful social transitions, and both deal with aspects of sexuality the discussion of which is normally confined to impolitic syndicated and cable television programs. While MIDNIGHT ultimately concerned a murder, however, no crime is committed in PENINSULA OF LIES, at least from the perspective of a statutory offense. The tale is, however, awash in deceit. Ball's work, in any event, stands boldly on its own without need for comparison or contrast with the earlier MIDNIGHT. My personal marker for Ball's abilities is the fact that I have absolutely no interest in the subject of transsexuality or gender reassignment, yet I found myself unable to stop reading PENINSULA OF LIES once I picked it up. Ball's subtle obsession becomes the reader's.
While the indelicate subject matter of PENINSULA OF LIES may somewhat limit its audience, it is worth reading for its deep research and its ability to capture and preserve a time and a place that is rapidly disappearing, as well as its resolution of a mystery that, however briefly, enjoyed some passing notoriety.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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