THE WINGS OF THE MORNING
Thomas Tryon
New York: Knopf, 1990
568 pp., $22.95
According to the dust jacket, The Wings of the Morning is Thomas Tryon's "most ambitious novel to date, a leap beyond his more popular novels, which include Harvest Home, The Other and Crowned Heads. And indeed The Wings of the Morning is a novel with a promising and well-conceived focus. The first in a series of novels under the general title of Kingdom Come, it is intended to be a chronicle of the dynamic and expansive American republic, beginning in the early nineteenth century. Tryon has chosen to take the macrocosm of America and view it through the microcosm of Pequot Landing, a fictionalized port on the Connecticut coastline. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the novel's heroine is herself symbolic of the virtues of Pequot Landing and hence of the hope and promise of the nation. All of the myriad characters and incident of the story feed like tributaries into the novel's grand conception.
The clarity and sweep of the novel's formulation, however, stand in fairly sharp contrast to the execution of that design. Within a hundred pages, it becomes evident that Tryon is writing in the manner of a Barbara Cartland romance. In the course of a single day a young sea captain named Sinjin and a nymph named Aurora, who come from feuding families, fall in love and decide to elope to China. Sinjin is the adopted black sheep of the Grimes family, scarred from previous adventures, with a ring in his ear and a monkey on his shoulder. Not surprisingly, he idolizes the life and piety of Lord Byron, alternating between intellectual idealism, simmering lust, and world-weary despair. Aurora is a shimmering beauty who has recently emerged from convent school in Charleston, reads mildly pornographic novels under the cover of her bed-sheets, and laments her boring, inhibited life. By page 98 it is only to be expected that we find them engaged in the following activity:
Blindly and without thought they kissed - achingly, greedily, as if everything in their lives had led only to one such kiss, as if the world began and ended with such kisses as this. Their blood raced, their hearts beat, their bodies clung. They hid together behind the wall, safe, warm loving - wait - wait! To her horror, she felt his hand slipping form her waist upward to her bosom and his expert fingers began to insinuate themselves to the bodice of her dress. His palm was on her breast!
In less than 24 hours, we subsequently learn, Aurora not only loses her horror of Sinjin's wayward hand, but welcomes a fair amount of further insinuation.
But to return to the issue at hand: The Wings of the Mornings is a novel that is divided against itself. Its overall conception points to a vivid and realistic re-creation of history, but its narrative is almost pure romance, a genre that inevitably heads toward fantasy. Instead of the tang and savor of real life, we get recycled literary conceits.
Tryon might object here that the Sinjin-Aurora story is not in fact the center of the novel, but a sugarcoating intended to draw readers into the true heart and soul of the novel. This is not very far form the truth. For as it turns out, the
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