Allan Massie admires AN Wilson’s unfashionable preoccupation with theology
Aftershocks by AN Wilson, Atlantic Books, 273pp, £16.99
AN Wilson’s first novel, The Sweets of Pimlico, was published a few weeks before my own debut. Yet, though we began together, he is younger by 10 years, and, while I have been fairly prolific, he has been wonderfully so. There have been more than 20 novels and at least as many biographical and historical works.
Wilson has been willing to tackle almost any subject, usually successfully. He would surely be regarded as England’s premier man of letters, but for two things, both unfashionable. The first is his prodigality – how do readers keep up with him?
The second, and more important, is his preoccupation with Christianity and the problems of theology. He worries at these like a Victorian clergyman trying to reconcile the Bible with German textual criticism, the discoveries of geologists and the theory of evolution – though, characteristically, Wilson is also aware of the comedy of this predicament.
This new novel is set on an imaginary island in the South Pacific: a British colony in the 19th century, now independent, its people an agreeable mixture of British and Polynesian stock. From its early days the Island colony took its character from the Anglican Church.
Wilson writes agreeably, even movingly, about the beauties of the Anglican tradition, while recognising that the Church of England’s pretention to be a national church is, sadly, no longer credible.
The novel appears to have been inspired by a visit Wilson made to New Zealand after the earthquake that devastated the city of Christchurch. But he insists it is not a novel about New Zealand. “It is about a group of people caught up in an earthquake, two of whom fall in love. It is set in an imaginary place.” Fair enough – no doubt this protestation was necessary. There are always people who refuse to recognise that fiction is, just that, fiction – and that often, the more fictional, the truer it may be.
The earthquake invites the question which has perplexed men and women at least since the Book of Job: how can we reconcile the idea of a benevolent God with the pains and miseries of the world; an all-powerful Creator who permits such horrors with a loving God who cares for the beings he has willed into life? In a sense this is indeed “The Only Problem”, the title also of a Muriel Spark novel which she described as a meditation on Job.
In Wilson’s novel the question is explored through the opposition of what the narrator, a charming, rather scatter-brained young actress, at first presents as an argument between two different people who are, however, bosom friends: Eleanor, the cathedral dean, and Digby, an academic, writing a book on Greek tragedy. Eleanor believes in the loving Christian God; Digby knows that the Greek tragedians saw the gods either as indifferent to suffering humanity or willing, indeed happy, to inflict pain and misery on mankind. This view was later given expression by Shakespeare in King Lear: “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport”. The earthquake is, after all, what the insurance companies call an “act of God”.
Wilson describes the horror brilliantly, and its effect on his wide range of characters. For this is not only a novel of ideas – and a very good one – it is also a delicious social comedy and a surprising love story, one over which the narrator at first draws a perplexing and truly misleading veil.
Moreover, his depiction of his imaginary island and its people is charming and fully fleshed out. This is so thoroughly done that readers might be forgiven for consulting Google about the availability and cost of flights there, and which hotels have survived the quake.
Wilson’s willingness to shift from a first-person narrative to an authorial omniscient one would have earned the disapproval of novelists like Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. But better to break any such arbitrary laws than to find absurd ways to reconcile them with the needs of the narrative, and Wilson, whose style is delightfully relaxed, recognises that maintaining a certain tone of voice gives the novel a desirable unity, and never mind the tyranny of the point of view.
Aftershocks is serious comedy, like Wilson’s masterpiece in fiction, the five novels that make up the Lampitt Chronicles, perhaps the most successful – and enjoyable – comic sequence in English fiction since Anthony Powell drew down the shutters on A Dance to the Music of Time.
It will also remind readers that Wilson is first and foremost a novelist, and that no matter how fine the biographical and critical books he has written, his novels surely have an enduring vitality that non-fiction very rarely has. An authoritative new biography will supplant an earlier one, no matter how good it may be. But good novels can’t be smothered by revisionist works.
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