Surviving The Quincunx by Charles Palliser
1 CommentsBy Lostcheerio on Saturday, March 21, 2009 at 3:15 PM.
Yesterday, watching CNN, I saw a feature piece about a man who has been feeding the homeless daily out of the back of his truck in a Queens neighborhood for ten years. I found myself astonished that such a man could exist, that such selfless charity could be going on. Surely he must have some hidden motive, some personal failing out of which this commitment has arisen. He can't be just a NICE GUY doing a NICE THING for people in NEED. Of course, he can. He does. Nice people do nice things all the time with no hope of personal gain, no secret, devious agenda. I just had a hard time believing it.
I blame Charles Palliser, and his novel, The Quincunx, which I have been reading for about a month. This 800 page behemoth of a Victorian novel (neo-Victorian? 1989) drags its readers and main character through every milieu of horror, every site of human want and degradation, through the most wretched poverty, the most abject misery the 19th century had to offer. And of course, the 19th century offers plenty. Feel like you've been there, done that? After all, you've read Dickens, right? Seriously, this is Dickens on crystal meth. Imagine the nightmares of Dickens, but without the comfortable distance of Dickens' hyperformal language. And imagine that everyone, everywhere, is purely selfish, purely wicked, and does nothing for any reason but blunt personal gain. The protagonist of this novel, who starts out a boy and ends up a much thinner, much more suspicious boy, lives through every possible awfulness of the time, from agricultural slavery to being a knife-and-boot boy, to various murder attempts, and many, many, many betrayals. Everyone who appears to be trustworthy is false. Everyone who offers love is immediately killed or destroyed.
It is BAD. It is bad in early 19th century England. Very very bad.
However, I am glad I read it for two reasons.
First, if I'm ever tempted to be one of these people who says, "How dare the government take my money to give it to poor people? Leave that to the churches and to my personal charity!" I have only to recall what the churches and individuals of the time were able to do for the working class when the industrial revolution was just beginning, when common lands were being fenced and sold, when there were no legal protections for children, no laws governing labor, no laws governing housing standards, etc. Individuals and churches I'm sure did a lot for a lot of people, but it wasn't enough, given the grinding, irresistable motivation of people to get more money, more power, more property. You could read this book and come away saying, "Wow, the poor in this country really have it made." And I say that's a good thing. I don't want to have to step over dying people and starving orphans. Paying taxes will be just fine, thanks. The thing is, and this is what became clearer to me while reading this book, that without public education, school lunch programs, health care, and other entitlements, there truly is a caste system from which there is no escape. Without money, you can't get money, and you are just trapped. Palliser is a scholar, and he researched the book for 14 years. He's truly captured the period, and seeing it played out before you in such lurid and exacting detail is so much more compelling than reading about it in facts and figures.
The other reason I'm glad I read it is that it was a great read! I was completely fascinated by the time I was ten pages in, and the story just grabbed me by the collar and railroaded me right through to the end. It was almost un-put-downable and I spent many sleepy mornings having stayed up way too late the night before. It is *not* a morality book, although I've spent time talking about that aspect of it. I haven't talked about the plot at all, but much has been
made of the mystery in the extremely elaborate, very intelligently wrought story that drives the book. Go here if you've read it and want to ponder all its intricacies. It involves an inheritance, a murder, and a whole lot of family tree.If you do decide to read The Quincunx, make sure you have some time set aside to cope with obsessive reading. And it might be good to take this one on in the summer months, when you can go outside periodically and remember that life is good, that people can love, and that redemption is possible.
Labels: book reviews, books, charles palliser, quincunx, reading
Since I have been writing about American Idol for two days, I feel the need to elevate the tone of this blog a little. Of course John Irving called this book "entertainment" as opposed to "literature." I'm not going to get into it with John Irving on the merits of various books. John Irving and I have never had a problem before, in all the many times we've exchanged thoughts on art and pop culture.I very much like entertainment. However, it took me six weeks to read A Man in Full. It is very long. If you had told me on the first of the year that I would spend six weeks of my young, vibrant, fascinating life reading a book about Atlanta politics, real estate developers, bank management, and Stoic philosophy, I would have said, No. However, Wolfe's true subject was one that held me in its thrall from the first chapter, and kept me coming back eagerly, through all 750 pages, during ballet class and through late nights, until the paperback was falling apart from being crammed into my bag. His subject is men. What is it to be a man at the end of the 20th century? What is it to be a man at all? The book follows four men through a twisted plot that would take me several pages to summarize. I'd rather talk about the way the book is written.
Wolfe goes back. Way back. And he goes in. Way in. There are two main characters who meet at the very end of the book, and in a sense the book truly begins when they meet. However, the book begins months in advance of that meeting, and the ostensible impetus for the book is only actually tangentially related to them. There is an alleged crime, if you must know. Which has also got a tangential relation to the real theme (what is a man). The books starts after 700 pages, when the main characters meet for the first time. Using the fake impetus allows Wolfe to begin at the true beginning, when these characters are at a stable place. Then Wolfe can put them in the butter churn and start beating them into butter.
The other thing that I found interesting about the construction of this novel was the episodic nature of the chapters. At the beginning of the book, the chapters focus exclusively on one character or another, and some of them are so brilliantly episodic that they would be amazing short stories, with no context at all. After one of the early chapters about Conrad, the youngest and possibly most sympathetic of the four central men, I shut the book and put it down, because I felt I had just read such a great scene, I had to stop.
Let's talk about the whole concept of sympathetic characters, for a moment. With the exception of Conrad, every one of the men has significant flaws. Even Conrad, if you think about it, is deeply flawed. It's hard to see the flaws of these male characters, however, because they are presented so sympathetically. Well, not sympathetically. The narrative is not sympathetic, but it is exhaustively detailed, claustrophobically close to the characters' consciousnesses, minute. We feel that we know them so well, understand them so well, perceive their contexts and histories so well, it is hard to pull back enough to remember that they are doing things that are pretty reprehensible. It's part of what makes this book so interesting -- the moral ambiguity that's available to the reader, as we are allowed to put on all of these different identities, and really inhabit them without judgment, without even reflecting on right and wrong.
How does Wolfe do this? How does he simultaneously show us all of these slimy lowlifes, and give us permission to cheer for them, to wish them luck, to hope things work out somehow. I am not even sure.
After I recover from the effort, I will read another book by Tom Wolfe. Maybe I Am Charlotte Simmons. Want to trade your copy of that for my copy of this? Wolfe takes a long time to write his novels. I like that about him. A Man In Full
was just wonderful. I highly recommend.Labels: a man in full, book reviews, books, literature, reading, tom wolfe
