A Round of the Same

ON an afternoon in the late autumn of the Empire which we associate with the most strenuous propriety that the English, a proper people, have yet achieved, we could have found at a tea table in London a sight that would have given Victoria the vapors. The tea was proper enough; but the company was Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, and with them Dickens’ mistress, Collins’ mistress and La Eliot’s lover. Just a few years before, the Duke of Wellington, honest old solider that he was, arrived at his mistress’s apartments in a coach that all London knew; they also knew that it was none of their business what the Iron Duke was about. Things have gone underground since.

Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, writers at large, have collaborated on a farce about the amorous deviousness of the English of today. Of the proper English, rather. The novel concerns a group of likeminded gentlemen who form a society for the pursuit of whatever it is they pursue (we are never told). The ruse is Egyptology, and the comedy is generated in keeping the ruse’s face on; obviously it must slip at every turn of the page. This Cold War Pickwick Society is drawn with just enough verve to keep its phlegmatic subject from sinking out of sight as we read. There are comic moments that keep the book from total silliness, as when a member becomes genuinely interested in Egyptology and is thereby disgraced, and when the head of the Vice Squad joins the society in the course of investigating it. But the joke is hard to keep alive and for the most part we are kept reading solely to discover just what the Egyptologists are up to. Once we discover that we aren’t going to be told, we have the choice of savoring a joke too subtle to have a punch line or of realizing that we’ve been had. I suspect that wispy giggles of this sort will be interesting about fifty years hence, when the critics can imagine that there was an audience for it, and be curious about the audience.

GD

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Guy Davenport

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ON an afternoon in the late autumn of the Empire which we associate with the most strenuous propriety that the English, a proper people, have yet achieved, we could have found at a tea table in London a sight that would have given Victoria the vapors. The tea was proper enough; but the company was Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, and with them Dickens’ mistress, Collins’ mistress and La Eliot’s lover. Just a few years before, the Duke of Wellington, honest old solider that he was, arrived at his mistress’s apartments in a coach that all London knew; they also knew that it was none of their business what the Iron Duke was about. Things have gone underground since.

Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, writers at large, have collaborated on a farce about the amorous deviousness of the English of today. Of the proper English, rather. The novel concerns a group of likeminded gentlemen who form a society for the pursuit of whatever it is they pursue (we are never told). The ruse is Egyptology, and the comedy is generated in keeping the ruse’s face on; obviously it must slip at every turn of the page. This Cold War Pickwick Society is drawn with just enough verve to keep its phlegmatic subject from sinking out of sight as we read. There are comic moments that keep the book from total silliness, as when a member becomes genuinely interested in Egyptology and is thereby disgraced, and when the head of the Vice Squad joins the society in the course of investigating it. But the joke is hard to keep alive and for the most part we are kept reading solely to discover just what the Egyptologists are up to. Once we discover that we aren’t going to be told, we have the choice of savoring a joke too subtle to have a punch line or of realizing that we’ve been had. I suspect that wispy giggles of this sort will be interesting about fifty years hence, when the critics can imagine that there was an audience for it, and be curious about the audience.