Gay back when: the spellbinding new English novel As Meat Loves Salt is a sprawling tale of a 17th-century soldier who discovers his love for men.

As Meat Loves Salt * Maria McCann * Harcourt * $15

Jacob Cullen, the unforgettable narrator in Maria McCann's riveting, fiercely intelligent, and brutal first novel, is a strapping mercenary soldier in 17th-century England's civil war. He's quick-tempered, God-fearing, and easy on the eyes. He is also, as they now say, gay. Yet despite the depicted period's Christian fervor, As Meat Loves Salt is less a tale of religious and social persecution then a lacerating chronicle of pulverizing self-hatred.

Born to a learned, land-owning family, Jacob and his two brothers, Zeb and Izzy, are committed to servitude upon the death of their debt-ridden father. Resentful of his fate, uncomfortable with sex, and jealous of the even better-looking Zeb's ease with people, Jacob is prone to violent fits of rage. After an awkward but well-intentioned marriage to the lovely Caro, a fellow servant, Jacob fears himself accused of the recent murder of a beautiful young man. Fleeing a bloodthirsty mob, he, Caro, and Zeb escape to the woods where after one of his harmful outbursts, Jacob is abandoned by his wife and brother. Disheveled and unconscious, he is discovered by the gentle, charismatic Christopher Ferris of Parliament's New Model Army. After a prolonged courtship while fighting the Royalists (and some bloodcurdling battle scenes), the two men form an erotic bond that by turns bewilders, softens, and inflames the volatile Jacob.

History may suggest that England basically went to war because the Puritans hated the fun-loving ways of King Charles I. But McCaun shows us a more vivid world of struggle between tired old ideas like the rule of kings and radical new ones like government by the people. At ease moving from claustrophobic manor life to the urban decadence of 1640s London to the feral fields of colonist settlements, McCann is a spellbinding storyteller. Action- and dialogue-driven, the expansive tale only occasionally falters in its unedited excesses. There are moments toward the end, when Jacob and Ferris found a farming community, that drag with the chitter-chatter of the mundane, but the lull only intensifies the conclusion's inevitable but nonetheless devastating violence. Sprawling in length, rich in period detail, and astonishing in its psychological insights, the book reads like an old-fashioned Victorian social novel with a bit of Freud thrown in.

Superb at narrative foreplay, McCann lets the story's homoeroticism percolate for 300 pages before anything is consummated. Once things get going, she emphatically gives the lie to the myth that women can't write hot and convincing gay male sex scenes. McCann refuses to sanitize or romanticize sexuality's raw animalism. She is also not afraid to explore gay men's heterosexual impulses as well as straight men's erotic bonds.

But what is most impressive--and upsetting--about McCann's unsentimental book is her Shake. spearean skill at showing how people's failings can be so entrenched as to be unalterable. Try as he may, Jacob's attempts to love, to shake off his annihilating worldview, seem doomed. Jacob's inevitable fall is never portrayed as a mere product of his and society's homophobia but as an inherent consequence of his totality. "I was not made to be loved," he admits. "The glances of the London people had told me that I was far from ugly. But I was afflicted with an ugliness of soul that no physick could correct." It's a heartrending confession, conveying that for many--gay, straight, powerful, or oppressed--the greatest enemy is often not without but within, intent on self-destruction.

Bahr also writes for The New York Times, Time Out New York, and Poets & Writers.