Spineless Reviews

Chang’d in outward lustre

The Rebel Angels, by Robertson Davies

£6.99 (OOP), Penguin (1989)

A monk, a priest and a respected academic go in search of an unpublished manuscript by Rabelais, stolen from a billionaire art dealer (now deceased). The manuscript is the key to the future life of Maria Magdalena Theotoky, bringer of God to the world, and the three heroes are all Rebel Angels, bringing fire to the woman. Paracelsus makes occasional appearances, along with the magical healing powers of excrement and a gypsy sorceress who cures priceless violins with horse dung.

Fantasy? No. Robertson Davies has, by layering meaning and symbols on top of the otherwise mundane and self-absorbed world of Toronto academia, brought forth a violin from the dirt. Where fantasy imagines the perfect violin and falls short, Davies takes this smashing little instrument and makes it sing. He’s not exactly in the league of Stradivari (for the duration of this novel at least), but still nonetheless a capable virtuoso, a Guarnieri: fine workmanship and enjoyable, intricate sounds lend a richness to a novel where very little happens and so much is reported.

The ineffectuality of the lead characters is striking: Maria and her two main Rebel Angels talk the talk, and make as if to push and act and do, but it is down to the mouthy, overliterate Parlabane to move the story to its crisis, and his decisions are themselves communicated by him to the rest of the world through a flurry of self-conflicting correspondence. These people’s lives are still self- and book-absorbed; while the glittering world spins around them they sit poised at the centre of the dance. Through this conceit he builds up a more complex acadème than the usual stereotype of the ivory tower, before running it through with harsh realities that cure as much as kill.

Davies weaves an intellectual yarn: deep, but narrowed in vision to the confines of the university; convoluted, but ending up not far from its starting point; clever, but clever-clever. With all the action occurring off the pages, including the prologue that precipitates Maria’s love for Hollier, what is left is nonetheless more exercise for the brain than you’d expect from something so rambly. But without some sort of bite it reads like a thriller without death, a love story without passion, or heaven without its angels.

posted at: 22:30 | path: / d / davies_robertson | permanent link to this entry

Revenge of Etaoin Shrdlu

Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn

£6.99, Methuen (2001)

A book of letters, a novel without letters. What happens to human beings when their vocabulary is restricted, arbitrarily, one letter at a time? Such is the predicament of the inhabitants of Nollop, founded by the inventor of the Lazy Dog sentence, when letters begin falling off the great monument to Nevin Nollop. Books are confiscated and burned, to rid themselves of the Z that their founder has suddenly disdained from beyond the grave. And as the glue on the letters perishes further, so does their language and their freedoms. Those who speak words with the banned letters are flogged and eventually deported. Only the authorship of a pangram to rival Nollop’s great sentence can save the island from an imposition of silence. Can Ella and her band of rebels put one together in time?

Most fascinating in the novel is the subtle development of the language during the imposition of greater and greater strictures. Whether Dunn intended it or not, the tortures that language undergoes are chilling. The loss of Q, Z and J cause short words to be struck out and replaced by Latinate counterparts: long, flowery archaisms. But eventually constituents of these longer words drop out of the sky, and out of common, legal use; some can be replaced, but a pidgin develops, a combination of grammatical tricks and permitted misspellings. An announcement of a death—“Mie phrent Georgeanne perisht last night phrom let poisoning”—is turned from bathetic to pathetic, and this makes it all the more heartrending: such things are happening, and the words soon do not exist even to mourn, let alone protest. Society breaks down.

As a moral tale Ella Minnow Pea is thumpingly obvious in its message: state control over free speech leads to social decline and is the thin end of the wedge of totalitarianism. But as a lipogram it has a dynamism and fearfulness that the circumlocutions of A Void lack, and the central trick contributes to the tension and excitement rather than detracting from it. While the plethora of characters often makes it difficult to tell who is addressing whom, this study of the decline of such an epistolary society—Amos even leaves a note for his wife when she’s in the bath—is a lesson well learnt, and a story well told.

posted at: 12:23 | path: / d / dunn_mark | permanent link to this entry