Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shallow. Anthony Burgess, however, is one of literature's certified mandarins, known as an explicator of Ulysses (Re Joyce), a postapocalyptic moralist (A Clockwork Orange), and a scholar showily at home in a double handful of ancient and modern languages. He wigwags strenuously at the outset of this new novel that primal, mythic stuff is ahead -- ancient tales threading through the dark, tribal roots of 20th century bloody-mindedness...
...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...
...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...
Onstage, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the Choderlos de Laclos novel, was elegant and epicene. Les Lay caught the novel's central conceit -- that sex is a wicked game, the rankest form of show business -- in a witty talkathon on Topic A. The movie goes one crucial step further, allowing the characters to shrug off their finery and display some redeeming prurient interest. The actresses are all wanly handsome: ornaments of an era close to exhaustion. Pfeiffer and Thurman make for luscious bookends in the library of lust. Close sits back and plays the puppeteer...