Private fantasy imposed on reality

Press, 18 September 1976, Page 13

Private fantasy imposed on reality

The Great Victorian Collection. By Brian Moore. Jonathan Cape. 213 pp. $7.95.

(Reviewed by Bruce Cochrane) Obsessions govern the minds' of Brian Moore’s characters. The demons afflicting them have many different shapes, but they are alike in being possessed so completely that their passions of heart and intellect effect drastic transformations of the external world. The renegade Irish clerics of “Catholics”, holding out in their monastic retreat against the reformist decrees of the Vatican, create radical divisions in the church, confusing distinctions between faith and heresy.

In “The Great Victorian Collection” private fantasy imposes itself on reality in a manner more startlingly literal: Anthony Maloney, a historian visiting California, dreams one night of -getting out of bed in his motel room, crossing to the window, and finding in the parking lot below a fair or market crammed with pieces of Victoriana, artefacts and curiosities of all kinds, ranging from children’s toys to works of pornography. Since his Ph.D. thesis has concerned Victorian art and architecture he is untroubled by the dream, even pleased by it, until, on waking, he goes to the window and finds his imaginings bizarrely come true: the parking lot has indeed unaccountably become an antiquarian’s treasure-trove. What follows is an account of Maloney’s attempts to preserve his

curious collection from the assaults of a world alternatively sceptical and greedy. Authenticating it is initially his greatest task, but in that he succeeds; then he discovers that the objects deteriorate during periods when he is absent from the collection; finally he loses his job, his reason and his life in the increasingly futile endeavour to reconcile fancy and reality. The wit of the basic idea, and the elegant solemnity with which it is executed, give Moore scope for mining again that vein of rather wan comedy and restrained satire which distinguished his earlier works. In the first half of the novel especially, there is much sharp and humorous writing about the activities of quarrelling historians, avaricious entrepreneurs and aspirant voyeurs, eager for access to the erotica. But the main emphasis falls, as might be expected, on the psychological dilemma of the obsessed Maloney, and it is here that Moore’s conception of the fantasy collection proves to be insufficiently worked out, inadequate to meet the demands made of it.

Unlike ' “Catholics”, where the rebellion of the beleaguered monks was conceivable as fact, "The Great Victorian Collection" is founded on an impossibility which not even the most strenuous suspension of disbelief will lend the plausibility which is essential if the reader is to attend sympthetically to Maloney's plight. Had a comic treatment been sustained

throughout, the question of belief would not have arisen, but Maloney’s collapse into despair, madness and suicide asks to be seen as tragic. Since his neurosis has its root in the author’s foolery rather than his own personality, the psychological portraiture looks not merely factitious, but silly, and becomes the more objectionable as the tone of the writing grows more serious.

As a whole, then, “The Great Victorian Collection” must be accounted a failure, the victim of its own cleverness, though a failure nonetheless worth reading for the inventive comedy of character and situation of the novel’s first half.