Friday, April 18, 2008
Book Review: The Quincunx
The Quincunx by Charles Palliser is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's a monster - 781 larger-than-average and densely typeset pages - and it took me quite a while to get through it. But to me, the sign of a great book is that when I see there are only a few pages left, I wish there were more. Even though it took me several times longer to get to the end than it does a normal book, that was how I felt with this book.
It's a novel set in early 19th-Century England. John Mellamphy is the heir to an enormous estate, but there is a complex web of claimants and ulterior motives that is keeping him from what he comes to feel is his just rewards.
You know, when I stop and think about it, if I were to try to describe the plot to you, it would sound really boring: There's this will, and a boy stands to inherit a big fortune, but so do some other people if he's dead, so he has to keep avoiding them and outsmarting them while trying to learn more about the mysteries of his family history. It's actually a lot more enthralling than it sounds.
The plot is thick and full of mystery and clues. I heeded the advice of some Amazon reviewers and read the book with a pen in hand, marking when new characters were introduced and when important things happened. It was a helpful exercise, because I found myself often looking back to refresh my memory of some seemingly insignificant detail or comment or character that later becomes important. The author feeds us a steady stream of information at just the right rate to keep us guessing, but to also allow us to try to figure things out before they happen. There are helpful family trees and a list of characters at the back for easy reference.
There's symbolism too. A quincunx is the arrangement of five objects as a square with one in the middle (like the five dots on a die), and that quincunx keeps popping up time and time again throughout. The novel is organized into five Parts, which each have five Books, which each have five Chapters. It's like the structure is a quincunx too.
By no means is it a perfect book. It certainly dragged at times, and quite often it seemed as if our hero, John, is just riding the waves of fate, passively waiting and enduring and overcoming challenges that keep coming to him without ever proactively doing anything on his own. Palliser isn't great at characterization - most of the many, many people we meet are quite flat and sometimes melodramatically stereotyped, and I can't say I even really came to care deeply for John himself, though I spent nearly 800 pages with him. And although Palliser goes to pains to make the reader aware that he's a thoughtful author who doesn't just have his characters stumble onto coincidences because he couldn't think of anything better, John's final perilous situation is resolved in a rather deus-ex-machina manner, explained away as nothing more than a character's sudden and unlikely change of heart.
But what Palliser does exceptionally well, and what kept me so absorbed in the book, is transport the reader to a different time and place. That's one of the basic, fundamental things books are supposed to do, and it's a rare book that does it as vividly and effectively as this one. The lush descriptions of the high-class society and street-beggar langour of Dickensian England was second to none (including perhaps Dickens himself, methinks, though I haven't read one of Dicken's great novels in a long time). As I read, I truly felt like I was a part of this society, feeling all of the ups and downs (especially the downs - the descriptions of the lowlifes, the criminals, and the destitute are the best). When I had to put it down, I almost had to shake my head and rub my eyes to get back into America in 2008.
As one review I read pointed out, it's amazing that Palliser would even take on such a monumental and epic project, but it's even more amazing that he pulls it off so fantastically. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's worth the investment of time and mental effort to read it and experience it. Compared to this giant of a book (both literally and figuratively), most of the books I read seem so... so... lightweight.
It's a novel set in early 19th-Century England. John Mellamphy is the heir to an enormous estate, but there is a complex web of claimants and ulterior motives that is keeping him from what he comes to feel is his just rewards.
You know, when I stop and think about it, if I were to try to describe the plot to you, it would sound really boring: There's this will, and a boy stands to inherit a big fortune, but so do some other people if he's dead, so he has to keep avoiding them and outsmarting them while trying to learn more about the mysteries of his family history. It's actually a lot more enthralling than it sounds.
The plot is thick and full of mystery and clues. I heeded the advice of some Amazon reviewers and read the book with a pen in hand, marking when new characters were introduced and when important things happened. It was a helpful exercise, because I found myself often looking back to refresh my memory of some seemingly insignificant detail or comment or character that later becomes important. The author feeds us a steady stream of information at just the right rate to keep us guessing, but to also allow us to try to figure things out before they happen. There are helpful family trees and a list of characters at the back for easy reference.
There's symbolism too. A quincunx is the arrangement of five objects as a square with one in the middle (like the five dots on a die), and that quincunx keeps popping up time and time again throughout. The novel is organized into five Parts, which each have five Books, which each have five Chapters. It's like the structure is a quincunx too.
By no means is it a perfect book. It certainly dragged at times, and quite often it seemed as if our hero, John, is just riding the waves of fate, passively waiting and enduring and overcoming challenges that keep coming to him without ever proactively doing anything on his own. Palliser isn't great at characterization - most of the many, many people we meet are quite flat and sometimes melodramatically stereotyped, and I can't say I even really came to care deeply for John himself, though I spent nearly 800 pages with him. And although Palliser goes to pains to make the reader aware that he's a thoughtful author who doesn't just have his characters stumble onto coincidences because he couldn't think of anything better, John's final perilous situation is resolved in a rather deus-ex-machina manner, explained away as nothing more than a character's sudden and unlikely change of heart.
But what Palliser does exceptionally well, and what kept me so absorbed in the book, is transport the reader to a different time and place. That's one of the basic, fundamental things books are supposed to do, and it's a rare book that does it as vividly and effectively as this one. The lush descriptions of the high-class society and street-beggar langour of Dickensian England was second to none (including perhaps Dickens himself, methinks, though I haven't read one of Dicken's great novels in a long time). As I read, I truly felt like I was a part of this society, feeling all of the ups and downs (especially the downs - the descriptions of the lowlifes, the criminals, and the destitute are the best). When I had to put it down, I almost had to shake my head and rub my eyes to get back into America in 2008.
As one review I read pointed out, it's amazing that Palliser would even take on such a monumental and epic project, but it's even more amazing that he pulls it off so fantastically. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's worth the investment of time and mental effort to read it and experience it. Compared to this giant of a book (both literally and figuratively), most of the books I read seem so... so... lightweight.
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