A novel that feels like a masque, playing for three acts with serious things and abstruse things, and ending with Sebastian, the character most in need of reassurance, encountering “a very pregnant lady with a very nice face sitting on a golden chair” in a house “built as a temple to love, hospitality and the arts.”
Or is it a sleek, iPhone-era version of “The Tempest”?
Hunter, the freebasing billionaire (it's a St. Aubyn novel) is a Prospero who creates the court within which the action unfolds. As a schoolboy, he “invited his gang of reckless and clever friends to join him on the roof.” And we catch up with him years later, as his wealth transforms the lives of all the main characters.
But not the comic villains (Moorhead, Saul, Cardinal Lagerfeld, MacDonald) who dream of being him, but can’t. But in the end, Hunter, like Prospero, doesn’t want to continue being the person whose “fear of a heart attack, psychosis and the other discouraging footnotes to his gargantuan lifestyle was trivial compared to his horror at the idea of doing anything ordinary.”
The meditations on scientific method, genetics, biological determinism, the mind/body problem etc. can be exasperating, but they aren’t meant to be compelling arguments, but expressions of who the characters are – which is more often than not exasperating.
Indeterminacy is not only a topic the characters discuss, but an aspect of the novel's form. ESA denies readers the illusion of sensing the future of the characters. In the end, only minor matters have been resolved.
The answers that explain nothing are contrasted with the actions that matter: “What part of the brain lights up when the reader first encounters Mr Darcy and his odious pride? Can literary criticism afford to ignore what is happening to the reader’s amygdala when Elizabeth Bennet rejects his first proposal? It is a truth universally acknowledged that any topic in search of a reputation for seriousness must be in want of neuroimaging. … Not only was the brain not the mind, but an image of the brain was not the brain.”
The reader learns who Francis is by learning that he wonders, “Why did every generation of biology student have to amputate the legs of living frogs and spectate on the beating hearts of crucified mammals, as if they were trying to join a tough gang whose rite of passage was a random murder?”
We learn this and much more about what Francis thinks and feels, but the reader is never told what Francis looks like. It’s one of the games of the book. The mind/body problem keeps getting discussed by characters who are intensely embodied, but don’t have appearances. Hunter and Hope – both Californians! – are the only major character whose looks are noted.
[Image: the Palm room, Spencer House]
Comments