TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012990/0129472.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.8 KB | 136 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 74

A Mask That Never Slips


By PAUL GRAY

THE QUINCUNX by Charles Palliser Ballantine; 788 pages; $25


    Well into this enormous novel, one of the hundreds of
characters who populate its pages remarks, "In any novel I
collaborated upon everything would be a part of the whole design
-- down even to the disposition and numbering of the chapters."
Not surprisingly, a like symmetry turns up in The Quincunx
itself. It contains roughly half a million words, apportioned
as follows: five parts, each as long as a conventional
contemporary novel, which in turn are divided into five books
with 25 chapters apiece. Structurally, then, the work lives up
to its odd title, which basically means a symmetrical
arrangement of five things within a square or rectangle.

    But considering what it contains, this design is a minor
peculiarity. Here is a novel, written during the waning years
of the 20th century, that passes itself off as a product of 19th
century British fiction. No fooling. Charles Palliser does not
resuscitate this old form -- which stretched from Jane Austen
to Thomas Hardy -- in order to play modernistically with its
conventions, as John Fowles did in The French Lieutenant's
Woman. Never does Palliser's Victorian mask slip to reveal the
ex post facto knowledge and anxieties of the present era.
Pastiche is not a means to an end but the whole point of this
enterprise.

    It takes a brave or foolhardy author to court competition
with the 19th century masters, to write an ersatz novel when
dozens and dozens of the real things are on the library shelves.
That Palliser succeeds in capturing this distant world of
Victorian fiction -- with its careful plotting and moral
punctiliousness -- is impressive enough for openers. That he
makes The Quincunx a gripping read throughout most of its length
is practically miraculous.

    Set in England during the 1820s and '30s, the novel is
chiefly narrated by a character who first appears as a young boy
named John Mellamphy. He lives with his mother in a small
village; he has no knowledge of his father, nor does he realize
that Mellamphy is not his real surname. Gradually, he comes to
understand that his mother possesses something that a number of
other people desperately want. It is the codicil to an old,
disputed will concerning the immense Huffam estate. The present
holder of that property, Sir Perceval Mompesson, wants to obtain
the codicil so he can destroy it. But another, mysterious enemy
can lay claim to the estate if he can 1) get his hands on the
codicil and then 2) engineer the deaths of John and his mother.

    These details by no means exhaust the plot; they simply set
in motion John's long, arduous journey toward self-discovery.
The idea that, somewhere, a powerful person has designs on his
life soon changes into an ominous reality for the boy. Strangers
try to abduct him. His mother's small inheritance is wiped out
through bad investments, all recommended by an attorney who is
supposed to protect her anonymity and interests. The two of them
are forced to flee from their village and hide in the
capaciousness of the capital: "Long before I saw London I smelt
it in the bitter smoke of sea-coal that began to prickle my
nostrils and the back of my throat, and then I saw the dark
cloud on the horizon that grew and grew and that was made up of
the smoke of hundreds of thousands of chimneys."

    The Dickensian overtones are impossible to ignore. John's
situation seems a direct conflation of Great Expectations and
Bleak House: he has the hope that his fortunes may improve and
the knowledge that, if he survives, he may spend the rest of his
days in fruitless litigation. But his adventures call to mind
a host of other Victorian novels as well. He is sent briefly to
a Yorkshire school and enters the harsh world of Nicholas
Nickleby; he overhears a former governess tell her life story,
and the events and diction take on the coloration of Jane Eyre.

    Fortunately, such echoes do not make The Quincunx a
mausoleum of older books. Palliser brings his scenes, no matter
how familiar, vividly to life. John's hunted movements through
London expose him to the full expanse of the sprawling city and
to all tiers of its society. He appears before the Chancery
judge in Westminster Hall and marvels wryly at the pomp: "The
Master was wearing a costume in which it was so impossible to
believe that he had knowingly attired himself, that it seemed
that it was only by a polite conspiracy among his observers that
no-one drew his attention to it." At one of his nadirs, the boy
searches for coins among the appalling muck of Thames-side
sewers.

    For all its vibrancy, The Quincunx occasionally seems to be
too much of a good thing. In order to wring maximum suspense out
of each encounter, Palliser allows his narrator some shameless
stalling. "Not so fast," one character remarks, when asked a
leading question, and the reader is inclined to mutter,
"Faster." John's mother is particularly maddening in her
refusals to answer her son's questions. A typical response: "No,
I won't tell you that. Not yet. One day you'll know
everything." Postulate a more forthcoming parent, and the novel
would be 200 pages shorter.

    Still, patient readers will find their investment of time
worthwhile. The book's leisurely pace contributes to the overall
effect of uncanny impersonation. Victorian novels were not brisk
because people had plenty of time to spend with them. Now it is
difficult to go home after work, put some wood in the fireplace,
light candles or gas lamps, and settle in for a long, peaceful
evening. The Quincunx suggests how much fun that could be.



____________________________________________________________
PALLISER'S PRIVATE PROJECT


    Nobody in London's literary circles had ever heard of
Charles Palliser until last fall, when his first novel, The
Quincunx, became an instant sensation there. Palliser, 42, had
spent twelve years privately laboring on the 788-page epic. He
did not even tell his colleagues at Scotland's University of
Strathclyde, where he teaches literature, about the proj ect
until two years ago, when a tiny Scottish publisher agreed to
pay him a $900 advance. "I didn't want to make a fool of myself
if it never got published," he explains. The son of an Irish
mother and American father, Palliser grew up in Switzerland,
England and Wales. "I was always a bit of an outsider, caught
between different worlds," he reflects. Now that the literary
world has embraced him, what's next? His upcoming novel, The
Sensationist, is due out in Britain this summer. Set in
contemporary Scotland, it was just two years in the writing and
spans a mere 80 pages.