TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/012389/01238900.060

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 5KB | 89 lines

BOOKS, Page 66

A Triumph of Trying-Really-Hard

By R. Z. Sheppard


    INCLINE OUR HEARTS
    by A. N. Wilson
    Viking; 250 pages; $17.95

    Of all Britain's young literary lions, Andrew Norman Wilson,
38, has been busiest at marking his territory. Since the mid-1970s
he has published eleven satiric novels, plus biographies of John
Milton, Sir Walter Scott, Hilaire Belloc, and last year's much and
justly praised Tolstoy. In addition, Wilson has written about
Christian theology and religious affairs (How Can We Know?; The
Church in Crisis).

    Add to this diverse plenty a consistently high quality of
thought and prose, and one has the makings of a Man of Letters --
a quaint designation in this era of celebrity scribes, but valid
nevertheless. Wilson's formal structure and traditional style
indicate an impatience with the sort of contemporary fiction that
makes its own creation a central concern. What matters to him is
the contradictions of human nature and the religious impulses that
seek to understand the desires of the flesh and the spirit.

    These are assuredly old and durable subjects, yet ones that
Wilson probes with a comic irony sharpened on the modern world.
Inevitably, his work has been compared to the novels of Evelyn
Waugh. There are similarities but only "up to a point," as a
subordinate in Waugh's Scoop responded when Lord Copper blustered
that Yokohama is the capital of Japan. Wilson's comedy is more
tolerant than that of the malicious master. Both authors, however,
project intimidating confidence in their styles and possess a
technical virtuosity that makes the difficult look easy.

    Not surprisingly, these qualities can be found in the character
of Julian Ramsay, narrator and groping intelligence of Incline Our
Hearts. Born in London with the coming of World War II, he is
orphaned by German bombs and sent to Norfolk to be raised by his
Aunt Deirdre and Uncle Roy, a local vicar. Rounding out the rectory
household is Felicity, a laconic and inaptly named teenage cousin,
who leaves her room long enough to be impregnated and abandoned by
Raphael Hunter, scholar-scoundrel and the novel's sinister
presence.

    These are the central players in what evolves from a surface
entertainment into a deceptively rich and complex novel about
coming of age (if not about the age itself). Julian's story brims
with figures and rituals familiar to British fiction: barmy
relatives, eccentric aristocrats, a public school -- the "English
Gulag" -- where the headmaster enjoys hitting boys with sticks. As
a teenager, Julian spends a summer in Brittany, where French is
taught by Mme. de Normandin and sex by her daughter Barbara. Later,
while trying to avoid work in the army, he learns another of life's
essential lessons: "Not-really-trying is just as much effort as
trying-really-hard. The only difference between the two modes of
activity is that not-really-trying receives no reward."

    It is one of Wilson's deeper ironies that the callow but decent
Julian lacks conviction while the older and more experienced Hunter
is full of indecent passion and ambition. Hunter's conquest of
Felicity is pure business, part of securing the private papers of
James Petworth Lampitt, a deceased minor writer who was a friend
of her father's. Hunter succeeds, and by playing up Lampitt's
possible suicide and probable homosexuality, turns the life of a
justifiably forgotten literary figure into a scandalous best
seller. "One accomplishes nothing so stylishly as the thing in
which one has no belief," thinks Julian. "Gigolos probably make
better lovers than those weak with desire; the best politicians are
those who are most like actors; the most influential churchmen are
those who seem furthest from the ideals of the Gospel."

    Elsewhere, this demoralizing line of reasoning leads to more
profound conclusions. Unlike most autobiographers, Julian concedes
that what he remembers is only a crude map of his former self. "Our
attempts to recover or uncover the past and what really happened
are doomed at the outset to failure because it is we ourselves who
are doing the investigation," he admits. "We move on. We become
someone else."

    At novel's end, Julian, harboring ambitions to become an actor,
is in church listening to Uncle Roy intone the Ten Commandments
and thinking that the one prohibiting adultery will be hard to
keep. This, and his remark about politicians resembling actors,
suggest that Julian may grow up to be a successful public man who
gets entangled in a sex scandal. Given Wilson's production rate,
it is unlikely that readers will have to wait long to find out.
Incline Our Hearts is the first novel of a proposed trilogy. If the
next two are as good as the first, readers will have a small
classic on their hands.