A SEASON IN THE WEST
Piers Paul Read
New York: Random House
240 pp., $16.95
Speaking of the velocity, volatility, and "pluralism" of late twentieth century experience, Czeslaw Milosz has said:
We are constantly threatened by chaos and nothingness
because life as such is an enormous multiplicity. My
personal feeling about the twentieth century is that we are
submerged. The things that happened in this century in the
sense of horror and heroism escape our thinking and
formulations. The century is largely untold.
Literary art since Auschwitz and the Gulag somehow often seems--however well made or otherwise interesting--very small. With the possible exception of Solzhenitsyn, "the century is largely untold." Even Milosz's profound poems and prose books reach but a few and are consciously tragic, stoical, and aristocratic.
In the major novels of the English writer Piers Paul Read there is to be found another exception to this analysis. I know of no finer, deeper, more serious, or satisfying novelist now writing in our language. His three large historical novels--The Junkers (1968; about Germany), Polonaise (1976; about Poland), and The Free Frenchman (1986; about France)--profoundly meditate the twentieth century.
A Season in the West
His new novel, A Season in the West, is both a continuation and a departure. It too deals powerfully with contemporary history, but it is a much shorter book and in a quite different mode or genre from the three others just mentioned, though something of a return to one of Read's first novels, Monk Dawson (1969). Both are set in London and deftly deploy a gallery of contemporary English types--most of them decadent and repellent. Razor-sharp social observation is the means for satiric portrayals of vile characters and lost souls. The shades of Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot guide Read through the varieties of profane experience, though Read does not attempt Waugh's satirical velocity or fantasy. He is essentially a realist.
Contemporary history is more sharply felt in A Season in the West, which deals with the escape to the West, to London, of an idealistic young Czech dissident writer, Josef Birek, and his temporary championing by a wealthy, genteel, bored, and beautiful woman and her set. That Read has felt and thought through the attractions of Marxism is evident--it is the twentieth century's most powerful moral heresy and a great spur, goad, and tool for sharp and precise social and moral analysis, especially of the libertarian/libertine moral nihilism that dominates many of the wealthy in our time, for whom noblesse oblige is often no longer an intelligible phrase or necessary screen: conspicuous consumption being proof of greatness, success, or value.
Unlike some of even the most powerful contemporary
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