Angels and Insects. - book reviews

Neo-victorianism has a lot to be said for it, particularly when it is executed with flair. The swing of the pendulum sometimes reminds us of how much, not how little, we have in common with our predecessors. After all, the Victorians were the ones who led the way into modernization, the ones who agonized so memorably about faith, the ones who first explored the cultural terrain of the twentieth century. Needless to say, in the Anglophone world, the great Victorians were the ones who set the nearest standards in prose, in fiction, and in poetry before the transition into modernism. Even the Victorian experiments in the exercise of social responsibility, in colonialism, and in military intervention suggest all sorts of harmonics today. The spirit of Ruskin, the ghost of the younger Arnold, the shade of Dickens - these and many others hover about our heads when we think of the contradictions of capitalism, the disintegration of culture, and our responsibilities at home and abroad.

There are various remarkable people today who represent a spirited and successful neo-Victorianism. Paul Johnson, who vigorously blends history and journalism, is one. Lady Thatcher is another one, in another way. George MacDonald Fraser has for years been writing the outrageous "memoirs" of Harry Flashman, whose roguish adventures are an education in Victorian history. And there are other people and associated trends, such as neo-Victorian domestic architecture, which has been such a great relief for our eyes. One particular neo-Victorian artifact that had a certain success was the last book of A. S. Byatt. Her Possession: A Romance was a bestseller in 1990. Possession had going for it a dynamism of structure: two young academics become involved with each other as they study, respectively, a male and female Victorian poet whose own relationship is exposed, as the counterpoint of then and now is developed. But even in Possession, though the structure is imposing, the texture is blighted by arch voice-overs, donnish quotations, and the various anti-macassars and doilies with which it was tricked out. In any case, I doubt that such success is due for the two novellas constituting Angels & Insects, which seem to add up to a Hamlet without the prince, or a Masterpiece Theater without a masterpiece.

We do not go to the Victorians for finesse, as a rule. Nor to A. S. Byatt. For one thing, like a Victorian narrator, she follows the reader around with a cowhorn, instructing him in thought and reaction, rather than rendering an action and letting the reader enjoy the illusion of freedom in his engagement with the text. Morpho Eugenia, the first of the novellas, sets a penniless naturalist against a wealthy family whose behavior is supposed to resemble that of insect societies. When William Adamson is politely dancing at the house of the Alabasters, he remembers a palm-wine dance in primitive circumstances somewhere near the Amazon. The contrast should speak for itself, but not when A. S. Byatt is in charge:

Nothing he did now seemed to happen without this double vision, of things seen and done otherwise, in another world.

"You are thinking of the Amazon," said Eugenia.

"Are you gifted at thought-reading?" "Oh no. Only you looked far away. And that is far away."

Such dialogue makes me realize how hard it is to concentrate on the irony of Victorian ideas when I am reaching for an air-sick bag.

Neither have I been bowled over by Mrs. Byatt's powers of description, which seem to have been modeled on the language of ladies' magazines and Harlequin romances: "She was wearing a blue dress, trimmed with tartan ribbons." "She was wearing a nightgown in broderie anglaise, and the well-brushed hair fanned over her shoulders." "But she did appear there once or twice, delicious and vulnerable in white muslin, with sky-blue ribbons, and a little white parasol, and stand, waiting, for his attention, which she rewarded with a slow, secret little smile." This sort of thing might be written off as irony, I suppose. But even if it is ironic, you still have to read an awful lot of that stuff to get through Morpho Eugenia.

You have to read as well even more passages of high-minded conversation about the troubling ideas of Mr. Darwin. You must attend as the characters quote at length from Ben Jonson, John Milton, Robert Browning, and so on, as though Mrs. Byatt were thinking of one of Matthew Arnold's least graceful moments: "Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days, my mind?" You must endure the elaborate comparison of insect and human societies, an idea that I may not be alone in finding hackneyed. Finally, the reverse romance in which the resourceless male marries the mysterious female with the big house is exploded by the rudest of reversals, and then capped by a fairy-tale happy ending and escape to true life, love, and happiness. Does that sound cozy enough? I kept hoping that the novella would collapse into a short story, but no such luck.

The second novella, The Conjugal Angel, is a better work than its sibling - it does more with less. The world of seances and Swedenborgianism leads to a vision of Tennyson himself, as characters try to sort out the past and the contradictions of body and soul. But The Conjugal Angel still has the emetic properties of Morpho Eugenia. There is much smarm here which spoils the metaphysical poetry, the attempt to get at the paradoxes of the spirit and the flesh. I was quite downcast but confirmed in all suspicions to read this cloying passage on the second page: