Sometimes It Rains

Note: Having read novels like Red Harvest, Dirty Snow, The Gate, The Translator, Light in August, and The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, I’m hardly the kind of reader that avoids uncomfortable fiction. I don't need to like characters. Nor do I require an ending in which Jeeves has put everything right. But I am a reader who can feel tried enough to quit a novel. So apply the rule that always works: If the writer of a review is clearly an idiot, and the review is negative, then the result is a positive review.

The Quincunx - Charles Palliser

This 1989 chunkster takes the form of a massive Victorian novel of suspense like Bleak House. But it uses modern techniques. We have an omniscient narrator whose information could be interpreted in multiple ways. We meet tight-lipped characters that sit on information. We inferring readers know stuff that the characters don’t know.

After about 250 pages, I had to bail, but not because of the equivocal nature of the narrative.

First, though I enjoyed the detailed descriptions in The Children’s Book, here they demanded too much of my patience. I grant the author knows the economics and anthropology of Victorian London as deeply as Henry Mayhew. But the copiousness of background detail made me wait too long for the story to uncurl.

Second, relentless is the theme in The Quincunx that in Victorian England life for the vulnerable was typically brutish, uncertain, and full of distress. I was exhausted by the insistent background drone - like a leaf blower - that back then the poor never had a moment of rest. Going out of my way – i.e., reading a 900-page story set in a vicious, wicked, and miserable world – to lick the bleeding wounds of despair just didn’t strike me as a wise use of my time, from a mental fitness point of view.

Third, Dickens, Collins, and Trollope ruled autocratically over stories, wielding the power of life and death over characters. But we readers always knew that even though these authors were going to put protagonists through snubs, job woes, violence, affliction, murder trials, self-discovery, hellish marriages and on and on, they were not going to stew the lifeblood out of the protagonists.

Don't get me wrong. I’m down with characters cringing when authors reach for their whip (paraphrasing Nabokov, who put Humbert and Albinus through all they deserved). But as I read this novel, I realized that this late 20th century author was making no deals with me the reader along these lines of ‘things working out.’

Stewing the lifeblood out of this willful brat and his annoying mother was a distinct possibility, a prospect I approached with trepidation and relish, an unbecoming teetering that doesn’t do me proud. I suspected in genuine modernist style the ending was going to be ambiguous whether kiddie and marmee were ever going to get out of the jam in which the heartless scumbags landed them. And I thought I would be needing more than the ambiguities after 900 pages of anxiety, cupidity, and duplicity. 

Call me needy.

So, the plenty of detail and background, the risk of harsh themes in a treacherous world leaving indelible imprints on my mind, and the uncertainty whether the ending would be clearly unfortunate or ambiguously felicitous were too much for me. I don’t like being the reader that sniffs because the author didn’t write the book the reader had in mind, but bugging out happens, even at the risk of coming off as idiot whose negative review can – maybe even should - be interpreted as a positive review.

Hmmm ... where's that copy of Thank You, Jeeves?