Word: cyrill
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Indeed, Cyril's single-minded pursuit of pleasure--matched by Fiona's overwhelming (yet apparently insufficient) sensuality--and the almost grotesque immersion they seek in sex are fully compatible with the claims of the setting. But the resulting demands are so intense, the sex esthetic so jealous of other considerations (such as the urge to live decent lives instead of envious or exploitative half-lives), that the very paysage moralise becomes finally, for all but Cyril, more nearly that of hell than of heaven. Most of the elements which might arrange themselves in a really fine novel are present...
...principle, the images betray an artificial sense of indeterminacy: church icons, an eagle, the color orange, the children, a shepherdess and a shepherd, the fortress and the arbor, all these comprise a fabric of pretentious love and meaningless hatred. On a note of tragedy the tapestry grows sordid, but Cyril is so consistently enervated even the tragic sensation becomes a cheat...
...book's failure shows itself not in Cyril's character, as such, but in his flaw as an unreliable narrator. Not only does his insensitive greed provoke a climate for disaster (with Hugh's death in a fatal game of masturbatory coupe-corde, and Catherine's descent into madness), but his absolute self-preoccupation and enfuriating blindness deprive the story of its tragic force. Crushing Hawkes's poetry is the dead weight of what he contrives as Cyril's stupid prose...
Such stuff turns back the most attentive and sympathetic efforts to see things Cyril's way, which is unfortunately the only way Hawkes provides. Motives and individual fates sink under the trumped-up fetishes, and the vision is hopelessly blurred...
...vision, because it is uncanny and so much depends on our willingness to accept its terms, proves a dangerous basis for the novel: style outpaces content until even Cyril's pleasure principle is violated--inadvertently. So one finally believes that John Hawkes has the over-fat soul of a child. No matter how precocious, he is unable or unwilling to match his obvious talent with any sort of serious moral statement. Instead, Hawkes has cast himself (and his book) into a state of unresolved fantastic formalism...