A Mask That Never Slips

By Paul Gray

THE QUINCUNX by Charles Palliser; Ballantine; 788 pages; $25

Well into this enormous novel, one of the hundreds of characters who populate its pages remarks, "In any novel I collaborated upon everything would be a part of the whole design -- down even to the disposition and numbering of the chapters." Not surprisingly, a like symmetry turns up in The Quincunx itself. It contains roughly half a million words, apportioned as follows: five parts, each as long as a conventional contemporary novel, which in turn are divided into five books with 25 chapters apiece. Structurally, then, the work lives up to its odd title, which basically means a symmetrical arrangement of five things within a square or rectangle.

But considering what it contains, this design is a minor peculiarity. Here ! is a novel, written during the waning years of the 20th century, that passes itself off as a product of 19th century British fiction. No fooling. Charles Palliser does not resuscitate this old form -- which stretched from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy -- in order to play modernistically with its conventions, as John Fowles did in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Never does Palliser's Victorian mask slip to reveal the ex post facto knowledge and anxieties of the present era. Pastiche is not a means to an end but the whole point of this enterprise.

It takes a brave or foolhardy author to court competition with the 19th century masters, to write an ersatz novel when dozens and dozens of the real things are on the library shelves. That Palliser succeeds in capturing this distant world of Victorian fiction -- with its careful plotting and moral punctiliousness -- is impressive enough for openers. That he makes The Quincunx a gripping read throughout most of its length is practically miraculous.

Set in England during the 1820s and '30s, the novel is chiefly narrated by a character who first appears as a young boy named John Mellamphy. He lives with his mother in a small village; he has no knowledge of his father, nor does he realize that Mellamphy is not his real surname. Gradually, he comes to understand that his mother possesses something that a number of other people desperately want. It is the codicil to an old, disputed will concerning the immense Huffam estate. The present holder of that property, Sir Perceval Mompesson, wants to obtain the codicil so he can destroy it. But another, mysterious enemy can lay claim to the estate if he can 1) get his hands on the codicil and then 2) engineer the deaths of John and his mother.

These details by no means exhaust the plot; they simply set in motion John's long, arduous journey toward self-discovery. The idea that, somewhere, a powerful person has designs on his life soon changes into an ominous reality for the boy. Strangers try to abduct him. His mother's small inheritance is wiped out through bad investments, all recommended by an attorney who is supposed to protect her anonymity and interests. The two of them are forced to flee from their village and hide in the capaciousness of the capital: "Long before I saw London I smelt it in the bitter smoke of sea-coal that began to prickle my nostrils and the back of my throat, and then I saw the dark cloud on the horizon that grew and grew and that was made up of the smoke of hundreds of thousands of chimneys."

The Dickensian overtones are impossible to ignore. John's situation seems a direct conflation of Great Expectations and Bleak House: he has the hope that his fortunes may improve and the knowledge that, if he survives, he may spend the rest of his days in fruitless litigation. But his adventures call to mind a host of other Victorian novels as well. He is sent briefly to a Yorkshire school and enters the harsh world of Nicholas Nickleby; he overhears a former governess tell her life story, and the events and diction take on the coloration of Jane Eyre.

Fortunately, such echoes do not make The Quincunx a mausoleum of older books. Palliser brings his scenes, no matter how familiar, vividly to life. John's hunted movements through London expose him to the full expanse of the sprawling city and to all tiers of its society. He appears before the Chancery judge in Westminster Hall and marvels wryly at the pomp: "The Master was wearing a costume in which it was so impossible to believe that he had knowingly attired himself, that it seemed that it was only by a polite conspiracy among his observers that no-one drew his attention to it." At one of his nadirs, the boy searches for coins among the appalling muck of Thames- side sewers.

For all its vibrancy, The Quincunx occasionally seems to be too much of a good thing. In order to wring maximum suspense out of each encounter, Palliser allows his narrator some shameless stalling. "Not so fast," one character remarks, when asked a leading question, and the reader is inclined to mutter, "Faster." John's mother is particularly maddening in her refusals to answer her son's questions. A typical response: "No, I won't tell you that. Not yet. One day you'll know everything." Postulate a more forthcoming parent, and the novel would be 200 pages shorter.

Still, patient readers will find their investment of time worthwhile. The book's leisurely pace contributes to the overall effect of uncanny impersonation. Victorian novels were not brisk because people had plenty of time to spend with them. Now it is difficult to go home after work, put some wood in the fireplace, light candles or gas lamps, and settle in for a long, peaceful evening. The Quincunx suggests how much fun that could be.