Reincarnate
Paul Ableman
rhe Mangan Inheritance Brian Moore (Cape £5.50) l'his is a marvellous book. The prose is rich 4nd flexible and, as it generates people and Places and thoughts, never betrays a sense (4. strain. Nor is it the authoritarian kind of 1133rose which keeps its subjects on a leash. rian Moore's characters are not formula Igures, whose responses to any situation !,r_e predictable, but rather fictional beings `?at behave like people in the world, genereallY consistent or revealing a thread of " stinuity, but always quirky, volatile and k°111et1mes irrational. After one reading, I a'lieved in Kathleen, the pretty Irish slut, nnd her tiny brother, Conor, failed petty 'rook, drunk and 'a bumboy', as well as in all the other people on both sides of the Atlantic created by Brian Moore for this novel in much the same way as I believe in friends and acquaintances.
The story is gripping, mysterious and bizarre and yet, in spite of its passage through some'very eerie territory, vergingat times on the supernatural, sweeps away disbelief with its firm grip on the actual contours of experience. James Mangan, a Canadian journalist and one-time minor poet, is married toBeatrice Abbott, a stanof stage and screen. He wryly accepts the fact that her dilating celebrity has inevitably reduced him to playing the thankless part of `Beatrice Abbott's husband', a nonentity pointed out with amused contempt at parties and receptions.
Then Beatrice and it occurs to me that it is a measure of the book's quality that I have been describing events that precede its opening as if they were contained in the story. In fact, at the start of the novel, Beatrice has finally, almost inevitably, fallen in love with another man who, as often happens in show-biz circles, is the director of her latest Broadway success. She has left Jamie, promising him a generous divorce settlement. Feeling that he has become a 'non-person', he retires to his father's home in Montreal to attempt the reassembly of his personality. He recalls a family tradition that the Irish poet of the early 19th century, James Clarence Mangan (a historical figure most celebrated for the patriotic balladf `My Dark Rosaleen `still well-known in Ireland) was an ancestor. Searching through family archives, he comes upon a daguerrotype dated 1847 and, with a shock of intense excitement, discovers that it contains the likeness of himself. He and the man in the photograph, who could conceivably have been the poet, Mangan, are as alike as identical twins. A few days later, he receives news that Beatrice and her new lover have been killed in a car crash. He inherits all her money and, now a modestly-rich man, goes to Ireland to find out if he is, in fact, the resurrected image of 'Europe's first poete maudit' (a somewhat strange claim when one remembers Villon), the wretched drug and drink addict who died of cholera in 1849.
The remainder, and bulk, of the book charts his quest and its progressively weird, but always believable, revelations. The face, which is both his own face and that on the daguerrotype, has appeared before, it seems, in a chain of incarnations linking the historical poet with the modern Canadian. But slowly Jamie's initial exhilaration gives way to doubt and then fear as the dark history of that face — its association with poetry on the one hand and damnation on the other — is laid bare.
The story-telling is faultless and I have read no book recently that had in greater measure that quality for which no superior word need be sought than `unputdownability'. The novel's main climax in the Norman tower is wild, magnificent and contains profound thought on the relationship between the word and the world. What becomes of the past? Does it exist in the present solely as words on paper? My own answer would be that it forms the structural basis of the present as energy forms the structural basis of matter. But Jamie's terrible confrontation with his older double generates a discussion of the matter that recalls, in content if not in style, passages in Borges.
And yet —and I set down the two ominous monosyllables reluctantly — and yet certain doubts would not be stilled. Perhaps I can best expose them by quoting a single sentence from the work: 'This was the true reletive he had come three thousand miles tolind'. It is a paradigm of aline from an old-fashioned adventure yarn where it would serve to engender a sense of the romance and magnitude of the hero's task. But what does it mean for Jamie Mangan in this novel? Seven hours in an armchair, sipping drinks. He is a sophisticated, upper-class modern who buzzes about the world in Jumbo jets the way Boswell buzzed about London in hackney carriages. There are other anachronistic devices in The Mangan Inheritance which give it, for all its credibility and immediacy, a faint air of the Gothic. Although ostensibly the text concerns modern people in modern situations, structurally and psychologically it issues from a tradition of period romance. The book, therefore, has little to say that is of specific relevance to the late 20th century. There is no doubt, however, that it is a superb product of the imagination.
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