Word: ramsay
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Roiling these backwaters are two powerful, charismatic figures, Raphael Hunter, an outright scoundrel, and Albion Pugh, who is more of a chronic liar and gifted fabulist. Both men are effortlessly successful with women: Ramsay loses his wife to Hunter and a beloved cousin to Pugh. He envies Pugh's "capacity to mythologise existence . . . his charm and his whatever it was he had instead of genius...
Well, pity England. The Lampitts tend to be woolly leftists cultivating small gardens of scholarship and politics and dandling hangers-on like Julian Ramsay, the diffident narrator of all three books. In the first, Incline Our Hearts, Ramsay is a young man full of bright promise. In the second, A Bottle in the Smoke, reality, in the form of diminished hopes and a doomed marriage, sets in. By Daughters of Albion he is contemplating a book on -- guess who? -- the Lampitts...
...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...
...savaging her so badly that she required 100 stitches. It snapped and tore at an unemployed man as he watched the July 4 fireworks in Rochester; last week he died from his multiple injuries, including a 15-in. wound from calf to thigh. And in Atlanta, Houston and Ramsay, Mich., it has seized small children like rag dolls and mauled them to death in a frenzy of bloodletting...
Ironically, the most unflattering portrayal in the picture is not of murderer Halliwell or the perverse Orton, but of Lahr himself. Played annoyingly by Wallace Shawn, Lahr comes across as a block-headed buffoon with hardly a grasp of the events he is retelling. His interviews with Peggy Ramsay (Vanessa Redgrave), Orton's literary agent, point out the distance between artist and audience; it's as if Ramsay, representing Orton, is leading Lahr around on a string...