Cacophony
Peter Ackroyd
Napoleon Symphony Anthony Burgess (Jonathan Cape £3.25)
Yes; Mr Burgess is fluent and fanciful and inventive; he is even occasionally fertile. He tells us so himself, in a "verse epistle" to the reader. And the problem with this book is the temptation to put everything in inverted commas. Its title bears some allusion to the Eroica (so the publishers are kind enough to tell me), although the Elizabethan analogy between language and music seems a singularly pointless one at this late date. Certainly the writing has an artificial pace reminiscent of some of the more troppo passages of opera bouffe, but Mr Burgess's diction has a generally squelchy quality which one does not associate with anything in particular; "He hovered voluptuously on the promise of a sneeze but, a strong man, would not yield." I like that "hovered," even though it is supposed to be comic. The secret life of a hero is one of those incurably romantic themes which will remain novelettish despite all attempts to enliven it.
And Burgess certainly tries. There is, however, a rule in fiction that there are only a finite number of plots but an infinite number of novelists, and Mr Burgess contrives a rhetorical garishness by shifting the surfaces of his writing around like toy bricks: there are many different voices, letters, deadpan narrative and a number of poetic intervals (although Mr
Burgess is by no means a poet). The novel opens with Napoleon winning , battles for the Directory while his wife, between bouts of Bonaparte, is pining for a guardsman. Any novelist's pen would go out to her. We are then treated to Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, with some conventional moments of disease and /or terror. Eventually Napoleon is crowned Emperor, although Burgess never seems quite sure how he made it, and becomes 'N,' that formal yet abstract force which heaved its way out Russia. "Let the picture," as Burgess says in one of his less self-conscious moments, "be painted in tears." And Napoleon ends in exile, with doctors squabbling over his corpse. It is not a particularly pretty story, but in
Napo/eon SymPborlY the hero is the quintessentially romantic figure whose tears can kill
little children in the street, and the one who goes imongst his people in disguise. He is the hero who strives for the vainglory of nations before the growing power of the "Volk": "I had not yet got down to calling it anything," Talleyrand smiled, "but since you press me, I will launch the term master race." There are a great many of these nudges and winks to posterity, and a strain of what one might call contretemps runs through the novel: "This is the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth" and so on. This is, in fact, a conventionally imagined book which makes use of the iron disunities of our time and which whips up its language to a frenzy for no particular reason, Mr Burgess employs a variety of styles in an excessively self-conscious way, with the result that any dialogue' between recognisable human beings
seems a trifle cracked. There are some allusions to the Dynasts and some odd quotations from Gerard Manlay Hopkins, and the literariness of the whole narrative is mererly confirmed by a pastiche of Ulysses only some useful symbol, ingeniously hits on a tiny Australian mammal introduced to the London Zoo in the previous year. The creature was the wombat and the choice ingenious because into the wombat's sharp little claws fell all the succulent nuts of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and once a historian runs into Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company he is home and dry. Mr. Watson therefore calls his collage The Year of the Wombat (Gollancz £3.20) and proceeds to have ' as uproariously enjoyable a time with the period as any writer since William Gaunt.
He begins by drawing parallels between Rossetti and the tiny creature whose cage he used as a place of romantic assignation. The creature's habits "are nocturnal, and in beautiful accord with its instincts," although it "bites hard and becomes furious when provoked." This was a time when the War Department, having extricated itself from a discreditable war in the Crimea, was now embroiled in an even more discreditable one with Florence Nightingale. Pornography was in the air and a comet was said to be hurrying towards its own assignation with the Earth, whose history would perhaps be mercifully terminated. Parliament was struggling with a Divorce Bill, and the love life of Dickens was already on the disaster course leading to the deadly Ellen Ternan. The great so o
f the show are Macaulay, Ruskin. Kingsley, course the PRB, and Palmerston, of whom it was said that he was "redeemed from the last extremity of political degradation by his cook." The contradictions of such an age are so baffling that Mr Watson makes no attempt to resolve them. For instance, we may continue to marvel that the military imbecility of the Crimea suddenly flowered into the military resource following the Indian Mutiny, which is the great set piece of the year. Instead, we get a priceless example of deductive shorthand, with the spirit of England being measured against our old friend the wombat, which
sometimes indulges in a long ramble, and if a river should cross its course, quietly walks into the water and traverses the bottom of the stream until it reaches the other side.
The style of the book is elegantly, at times almost excessively, mannered, with a few alarming lapses into the less lovely vernacular of a later age. Did the Victorians "shack up" in "pads"? And could Holman Hunt be capable of "wanting in"? Certainly not in a context which incorporates hares "displaying their ambisexual retromingence," and Carlyle kindling fire from "the eleutheramaniac destruction of the Bastille."
The Year of the Wombat is built on the assumption that we all know as much about the theme as its author does, and it therefore possesses the same spirit of allusiveness as that urbane and elliptical classic, G. M. Young's Portrait of an Age. For this reason Watson's narrative needs to be read slowly and to prove I do not intend this as a criticism, I add hastily that I only wish his book had been twice as long. Certainly in this year of "straining of gnats and tilting at windmills," he might have squeezed in George Borrow's Romany Rye, the birth of the Halle, and the antics of the great Louis Jullien, who had not long before sold the idea of promenade concerts to the English by resorting to every extra-musical device except firing himself out of a cannon.
Watson's narrative leaves us with the impression of an afternoon spent meandering across the plains of a great parkland. From time to time Dodgson pops up from behind a hedge to ambush us with his new-fangled camera, Holman Hunt is seen disappearing over the brow of a hill leading a goat by the nose, and Tennyson is glimpsed skulking in the undergrowth to avoid people who keep asking him what his poetry means. All that disturbs the slumbrous afternoon is the faint rumble of thunder from Meerut. But it soon passes, leaving us to wonder why Mr Watson forgot to
1°Putibator September 28, 1974 answer the most intriguing question of aP. What happened to the wombat? It ended LIP In Rossetti's bedraggled menagerie in Cheyne Walk, where it was spotted one afternoon by Dodgson, who went back to Oxford, changed .1t Into the dormouse and himself into Lewl,s, Carroll and thus bestowed immortality on all four of them.
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