The Quincunx by Charles Palliser

The back cover blurbs of this l-o-n-g novel assured me that it is "...Charles Dickens reincarnated," and that turns out to be kind-of the case, except that it is not so much in the style of Dickens or a tribute to Dickens, as I had expected, as it is a parody of Dickens. Palliser has taken almost all the plot devices Dickens ever came up with for his many novels and has crammed them all into one book. Hence we have a young boy with unknown parentage, a silly and naive young mother, a lost will, a disputed property in Chancery, a young girl sequestered in a crumbling manor house, a mistreated governess, an avaricious (probably Jewish) money lender, an unscrupulous lawyer or two, an organized gang of crooks, a boarding school from hell, a madhouse designed to make residents go mad, the sewers of London, illegitimate babies, murder, kidnapping, bribery, blackmailing, thievery, grave robbing, prostitution, and just about every other disreputable tidbit that Dickens ever imagined.

But missing from this Dickens "tribute" is any of his humor, any of his celebrated ability to make characters come alive, and few of his "good" characters to offset the "very bad" ones. Almost every character in The Quincunx is a stock villain, and so the young hero meets with trickery and betrayal from all sides. And you know how Dickens and other Victorian novelists wrapped everything up neatly at the end, solving all the mysteries. Don't expect that here; many matters are left hanging, including the future actions of the protagonist.

Even though this book is immensely readable, I very soon felt that I was being tricked by the author, because as he was following so many of the conventions of Victorian literature he was at the same time upending them and employing a much more modern sensibility. In fairness, perhaps this was more the fault of the book reviewers who characterized the book as Dickens-like without noting that it was a negative of the generally optimistic viewpoint of Victorian literature that the right and the good would triumph in the end. All in all, this is a depressing and discouraging read.

The Quincunx became very popular when it was written (1989), despite its extreme length and extremely convoluted plot, or maybe because of it. Readers love a good story, and this one is action-packed from start to finish, going from cliff-hanger to cliff-hanger with virtually no down time. The construction of the novel, with five family lines revealed in five books of five chapters each, reflecting the shared family crests of five roses, provides interest to those who search for hidden symbolism. I chose to read it because of the back-of-the-book blurbs, and I have plenty of spare time, so I only spent a few days with it. For those without that luxury, I would say spend your valuable reading time with something less depressing and more authentic. For instance, you could read actual Victorian literature rather than a post-modern rehash.