Good Read: "Hearing Voices" and "A Watch In The Night": the final volumes of A. N. Wilson's Lampitt Chronicles

Hearing Voices by A. N. Wilson is the fourth volume of The Lampitt Chronicles, and was published some time after the third volume in the series. It seems as if we might have all expected a trilogy in the ensuing four years between the publication of Daughters of Albion (vol. III) and Hearing Voices. But such was not the case. The series would last another two volumes and end (or so it seems) as a pentalogy.

The novel picks up in the mid-60s with a death, possibly a murder, which closely echoes the death of James Petworth Lampitt, literary scion of the Lampitt clan. The action jumps from the present back to this era, and to Julian Ramsay’s run on Broadway in a one man show depicting the life of Petworth Lampitt. There is a hazy, 70s feel about the narrative. And Julian spends no small amount of time in either a psychotic or chemically altered state. Like the decade itself, Julian is a bit hazy on chronology and details, but the thrust of the narrative brings him closer to the truth about the substance of the Lampitt papers, the truth about Petworth Lampitt, and the truth about Julian’s nemesis Raphael Hunter.

“We are all hearing voices -- when we wake and dream, but only the artist makes hearing voices his way of life.” (119) So Julian attempts to wrestle with the voices that haunt his own life: those of his family and friends, particularly the Lampitts, and those of his artistic guiding lights, William Blake and Shakespeare.

Hearing Voices also looks at Vatican II and in particular its ruling on birth control. Ramsay becomes involved and enamored with a family deeply involved in the decision, and deeply desirous for a child. There’s a satisfying theological debate in this volume between Catholicism and Protestantism. The novel makes the case for the attraction of modern peoples to the deep mystery and spirituality of (Roman) Catholicism while it outlines the attractions of rational Protestantism as well.

By the time the final volume of the pentalogy A Watch In The Night opens, Julian is an old man. He is settled in the cottage that he has inherited from Aunt Deirdre. A Shakespeare presentation on television leads him into reminiscences of his later career as a Shakespearian actor and playwright. Another Lampitt relative figures largely as Julian comes to reside for a time in a former Lampitt seaside manor turned theatrical venue.

The thrust of the final volumes is about the discovery of the truth regarding a few of the characters. Campbell Dilkes, the former owner of the seaside manor, turns out to have been a fascist, and a young protégé of Julian’s is about to reveal this damaging fact in a biography -- much as Raphael Hunter had done with James Petworth Lampitt’s homosexuality in his biography. At the end of the novels, a demimonde of gay characters is revealed. One in particular, Raphael Hunter, has been Julian’s frequent cuckolder.

This gay subplot seems to serve as a metaphor for the inability to know those around you, the personal depths that we all carry within us. The novels do a very good job of weaving into the narrative the gay theme or subtheme. It’s never overplayed, nor parodied. And in the end, we see how what was true was always apparent just below the surface of everyday life. We’re reminded that our own denial, biases, self-involvement, tragedies and triumphs blind us to the truth of those who are closest to us.

A. N. Wilson, who is straight, and whose protagonist in these works is also straight, handles gay characters and gay issues deftly. Never pandering or parodying, giving us, in the end a satisfying account of homosexuality in the era without having written ‘gay’ novels so to speak. The only other novelist I can think of to compare is Michael Chabon.

I loved The Lampitt Chronicles. They were great reads, and I went quickly from the conclusion of one volume to the beginning of the next. They have a reputation for being a lesser A Dance to the Music of Time, Michael Powell’s twelve novel series. I’m reading ADTTMOT now and can say that Wilson’s Lampitt novels are very comparable in some ways, and surpass Powell’s novels in others. ADTTMOT is essentially plotless, without a narrative arc or destination, so to speak. The Lampitt Chronicles uses the truth about Petworth Lampitt’s life and works as its plot goal, but not in an overbearing way. Wilson’s achievement seems to be that he has been able to chronicle the age much the way that Powell does, but in a more artful, perhaps traditional, more skillful way. His achievement will never rivals Powell’s in terms of literary accomplishment. But it should rival it and surpass it in a few respects if one looks closely.

Good Read: Daughters of Albion by AN Wilson

Daughters of Albion is a curious installment in the Lampitt Chronicles series -- at least compared to its two predecessors. In it, the now divorced Julian Ramsay trips through the sixties in London. This is not so much the Swinging Sixties of Austin Powers, but the sixties of Labour governments and philosophical and critical innovation. The novel is a philosophical consideration more than a bildungsroman like the previous volumes in the Lampitt series.

As the novel begins, Ramsay’s friend Darnley has started a newspaper that seems to be a mix of gossip, radical culture and art. In introducing the paper to the narrative, Wilson introduces the character of Rice Robey aka Albion Pugh, a friend of Darnley’s and a contributor to the paper. The book opens at a literary luncheon at the Black Bottle, Julian’s former place of employment, and the conversation is somewhat dialectical, alternating between the Profumo Affair and an unorthodox Sunday newspaper piece by an Anglican bishop. We are in a London in which public officials consort with prostitutes (who consort with Soviets) and bishops who don’t believe in God. And the guardrails that keep society and culture on track are deemed outdated and useless.

Robey/Pugh is the central character is Daughters of Albion. The title is taken from a work by William Blake but in Wilson’s context it refers to the many, many women who are drawn to Robey in a sort of sexless eros. The character is almost too eccentric to be believable. He is a civil servant during the course of the novel, working for the Ministry of Works and seeking to preserve an ancient stone ring threatened by road works. He is a former schoolmaster who has written some enigmatic mysteries -- part Agatha Christie, part metaphysical speculation -- which were popular but are now largely disregarded.

While seducing co-workers and acquaintances with his ‘Buddha of Suburbia’ metaphysics, Robey/Pugh is at work on a religious epic, a verse biography of Jesus and/or Paul*. This narrative takes off on the apocryphal story of a visit to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea. In the Robey/Pugh version, Joseph is Jesus’ cousin and both he and Jesus visit Britain on a trading trip. William Blake haunts this novel as he did A Bottle in the Smoke, particularly his poem “Jerusalem” which posits such a visit by Christ. The poem is the basis for the lyrics to the hymn “Jerusalem” beloved of Anglicans and sung at every meeting of that most English of entities, the Women’s Institute.

In Robey/Pugh’s work, Paul (called Saulos) is also in Britain during Joseph and Jesus’ visit, and he is drawn to the numinous presence of the young Jesus. Both Saulos and Jesus witness a druidic human sacrifice, a sight that profoundly upsets Jesus. Later in the Robey/Pugh verse narrative, Saulos is complicit in and then witnesses the crucifixion -- likewise, he is present at the stoning of Stephen -- it is in fact he that throws the first stone. Throughout, Paul finds himself drawn to Jesus on a romantic and/or sexual level. His desire transmutes into metaphysical belief at his conversion.

Paul, like Julian, comes to believe that what is attractive about religion, perhaps even necessary to human happiness, is the mythical. Whether in the gospels or in the sanctity of ancient British sacrificial sites (of course, the site where Jesus witnesses the human sacrifice is exactly the site Rice Robey is hoping to save from the bulldozers) there is something lost in a world in which bishops lack a belief in God. As Robey puts it, “Each of us comes to fullness of life only when we have learnt how to mythologize it.”

Julian seems to come to concurrence with Robey. “That is, it matters far more how a person is perceived than what they are actually like… It was incontestable that Christianity… was something buzzing about in the mind of St. Paul. It was Paul’s perception of Jesus as a mythological being of cosmic importance which converted the members of the early church… It was precisely because St. Paul did not produce ‘facts’ which were capable of empirical discussion in the prosaic world of ‘Either/or’ that he was able to revolutionize the world.” (131-2).

Wilson has been quite famously an atheist until recently. He has returned to the Church of England and made quite a splash in the London Sunday papers and the New Statesman before Easter this year. You can sense some of Wilson’s sympathetic atheism in Daughters of Albion. He writes, “If I say that St. Paul imagined his theology, I mean that he created myths about Christ which were a response to his own profoundest psychological needs… and to which, for various reasons, many, many human beings have responded at the same deep level ever since.” (191)

So, for Julian, and for Wilson, there is something not quite believable but nonetheless necessary in the phantasmagoria of Albion Pugh’s visionary scribblings in his religious epic. He is a modern day Blake, drawing on biblical narrative for his own artistic and spiritual ends. He is also another man who seems to cuckold Julian at every turn. Julian wittingly ruins Robey’s career when he reveals that he is the source of the libelous gossip that Darnley prints in his underground paper. The libel trial brings the novel to its close.

Some of the critics say that Wilson is an uneven writer -- and I would agree in terms of this novel. It lacks the cohesion of Incline Our Hearts or A Bottle in the Smoke. Those two novels cover Julian’s childhood and adolescence, aspects of life that readers can identify with. The NY Times review of 1991 says that the characters’ identities are familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of underground London in the sixties. That’s not me! I’m still searching for some documentation of who is who and what is what in the Lampitt-sphere. Knowing more of that material would undoubtedly make this a more enjoyable read.

That said, Daughters of Albion gives an interesting and insightful account of the philosophical and intellectual currents that lead in sort order to postmodernism and narrative criticism. The fact that it uses Christianity as its central ‘text’ for these excursions is all the more compelling.

Next up: Hearing Voices

Good Read: A Bottle In The Smoke by A. N. Wilson

A Bottle in the Smoke is A. N. Wilson’s second in the series of novels known as the Lampitt Chronicles. The title refers to a phrase in the Psalms in which the psalmist says, “I feel like a wineskin (or bottle) in the smoke (of the cooking fire).” That is, empty and dried-up, hung too close to the fire and therefore overexposed, cracked… useless. The title is also a reference to Julian Ramsay, our narrator’s new profession and new digs. Julian is now a barmen at a rundown pub called the Black Bottle in the Soho district of London -- a city known colloquially as ‘The Smoke’.

The novel is an excellent account of life in the restaurant and bar business. I’m not sure if Wilson was ever truly a barman, but he captures the ambiance well. There’s a saying the bar business that “a regular is just a regular pain in the ass” and Wilson captures the inevitable dreariness of the everyday drinkers whose worries and woes work their way into the bartender’s life and psyche.

In the novel, Julian becomes a Lampitt by marrying Anne Starling, daughter of Lady Sibyl nee Lampitt. The Lampitt family is his uncle’s long obsession and Julian was inevitably headed to collision with the family. The portrait of this marriage is very sharply drawn, and Julian and Anne go from all inclusive young lovers to wary housemates to bearers of each other’s heartbreak over the course of the novel. Wilson gives another achingly accurate picture of cuckoldry and the resultant despair.

As Julian’s romantic ideals are quashed, he begins to read the earliest Romantic William Blake when he comes across Gilchrist’s biography of the poet. Blake haunts the book and his deeply religious metaphysics are the counterpoint to Julian’s reality throughout the book.

The time period the book looks at is the 1950s, just as the wartime austerity is departing, and as Julian experiences his first adult freedoms. Several of the characters are drawn on people of the day. Pilbright, a co-worker of Julian’s early in the novel, turns out to be a secret artist who is discovered by Julian’s romantic nemesis Raphael Hunter. Pilbright’s paintings are often biblical episodes populated with people and locations scenes from his everyday life, i.e. The Miraculous Draught of Fish at Kew. Clearly, he is based on English painter Sir Stanley Spencer. Julian has an affair with a novelist who may be Barbara Pym.

(I hope to do a bit of research to find out if there has ever been anything written about which characters represent which real life personages. If anyone knows of such info, leave details in the comments section of the blog post.)

Julian publishes a novel called The Vicar’s Nephew, a thinly veiled roman a clef about his early upbringing. It causes hurt to his uncle and aunt, and in some ways represents the disdain of the generation of Britons that came of age in the 1950s and shoved aside the previous generation. The same happened in the US, but it seems particularly cruel in the English context, since that generation endured such hardship and later triumph during World War II. Julian’s rejection of his uncle is particularly piquant by the end of the novel when he has replaced, and in some respects become, his uncle as Sargie Lampitt’s aide de camp.

And as in Incline Our Hearts, Wilson presents Julian’s emotional and behavioral failings in plainly and painfully. He is ruthlessly honest in portraying the hurt felt by and the hurtful actions undertaken by his characters. When Julian becomes aware that his wife is having an affair, he winds up at the toilet bowl retching. No righteous indignation, but rather debilitation and a loss of all dignity. When Julian describes his retributive affair with Debbie, Wilson both creates and tears down the architecture of the cheater’s elaborate edifice of justification.

“The first time I had been to bed with Debbie it had seemed like a blessing, a balm sent to heal a broken heart. After half a dozen times, it threatened to become a habit, and I found myself becoming coarsened by the experience. In moods when I wanted to disguise this fact from myself, I expressed it in a cliché -- I had joined the human race. By this phrase I meant that life is punctuated by emotional calamity. If your wife falls in love with someone else, hard luck; but maybe she will fall out of love, or maybe you, too, can find consolation. I assumed that it had begun from Debbie’s point of view as a piece of harmless sensuality, or simple kindness. For me, it represented a fall. Secret bedroom assignations in the middle of the afternoon. Returns to the bar where Debbie’s lover sat getting drunk, or to my flat where my wife had perhaps been working or perhaps spending the day in a fashion similar to my own. This is the stuff which makes us cease to believe in life. It was the use of sex, and of people, to console. I did not know that we cannot be consoled, by people, by alcohol, by anything.” (emphasis added)

This to me is great writing. The insight and honesty that Wilson in this passage is what we read good novels for. In these few lines, Julian moves through rationalization, acknowledgment of the wrongs by him and to him, to an understanding of the impact of his deeds, and then to a profound understanding of his own condition and the human condition writ large. “We cannot be consoled… by anything.”

This passage is why I am a Wilson fan -- and passage such as these about in A Bottle In The Smoke as in Incline Our Hearts. I have a feeling that this installment is one of the least popular in the series. It’s not in the New York Public Library’s lending collection. I found a used copy on Amazon and snatched it up. I’ll bet this one proves to be a favorite of mine at least -- the life of a bartender and the recklessness that is part of that life and becomes part of your own life, is so well portrayed. These novels are so rich, so well written and so rewarding. I don’t want them to end!

Next up: Daughters of Albion.

Good Read: Incline Our Hearts by A. N. Wilson

Before my trip to the hospital for some in-and-out thyroid surgery, I made sure to have a stack of books to read when I got home. I logged into LEO on the New York Public Library's website, and reserved several books to be picked-up at my local branch for the convalescent period.

I've long been a fan of A. N. Wilson, and have enjoyed his theological works as well as the odd novel. For this lie-in I decided to take on his five novel series known collectively as the Lampitt Chronicles.

The series begins with Incline Our Hearts which introduces our narrator Julian Ramsay. Julian is a World War II orphan living in a Norfolk vicarage with his Aunt Deirdre and Uncle Roy. The Ramsays have a terrible marriage and Uncle Roy is a figure of ridicule and animosity for Julian. The title of the book comes from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer of which Uncle Roy is a devoted adherent. In a hilarious scene of an early morning somewhat desolate Sunday service, it is only Aunt Deirdre in the congregation, Julian is the server and poor Aunt Deirdre is the sole worshiper. Uncle Roy recites the Decalogue as per the rubricks to unintentional effect:

Minister. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
People. Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.

Yes, well, one would hope poor Aunt Deirdre's heart will be so inclined.

The novel follows Ramsay through the "English Gulag" of public school where he is terrorized by mildly pedophilic headmasters and falls hopelessly involve with the art teacher. Julian becomes a chronic cryer after the death of his parents and wails endlessly when sent off to school. He grows into a cruel adolescent -- at least towards his aunt and uncle, and less so towards his cousin, the inaptly named Felicity. In his late, take-no-prisoners teens, Julian is sent abroad for the summer to Normandy where he is initiated into adulthood by the daughter of his hostess. Upon returning to England, Julian begins his compulsory National Service as a soldier at British stations in the Mediterranean.

All thorough this early stage of Julian's life, his existance and that of his closest family is shadowed by that of the Lampitts. The Lampitts are a newly aristocratic family deceded from a weathly brewer. The most prominent member, Lord Lampitt is a Labour peer. His son, "The Honourable Vernon" is a Labour MP. Lampitt cousins are parishioners of Uncle Roy's and the village vicar becomes obesessed with the family. He becomes a encyclopedic source of all manner of Lampittology, and a nearly life-long friend and aide-de-camp of Sargeant Lampitt, his closest neighbor.

The Lampitts serve to give Wilson the means with which to examine the upper classes from the vantage point of the middle classes. And he does so hilariously as the Lampitts fail to live up to their potential time and again. Sargie becomes ridiculous and Lord Lampitt becomes more and more radical as the post-war era gives way to the Swinging Sixties.

But it is his examination of Julian, a middle class boy coming of age in post-war England that is the novel's greatest achievement. The schoolboy crush Julian has on the art mistress is so painfully portrayed, with equal measures of comedy and tragedy. There seems not a turn of the tender heart of a growing boy that is omitted. Each pining throb rings true. Julian's teenage arrogance and cruelty is painstakingly recounted, and in embarrassingly honest episodes, Wilson shows us just how heartless the young at heart truly are. Julian's sexual initiation is depicted with equal honesty and the obsession and ambivalence of lost virginity is accutely drawn.

I find Wilson's prose to be artfully beautiful in a the best modern tradition -- and immensely readable. His style propels you forward both in pursuit of the narrative and by the fluidity of the writing itself. Wilson is culturally and artisticially articulate, and the education his referents provide are worth the read.

I found Incline Our Hearts to be a great read. Smart and funny and insightful. This is what the post-war literary boom was supposed to be. Wilson fulfills those expectations and then some. I'm on to the next installment of the book and will report here how I find it.