248pp
09/07/07 - 10/06/07
Sometimes a book takes too long. I liked this book, but spent two or three weeks wishing I was done with it. Part of this is owing to the book itself: older novels tend to go slower for me, likewise novels that are driven largely by internal, psychological action. My own circumstances contributed as well: I moved to a new town and started a new job; sometimes even people who make time for reading find that there's simply no time for reading. To be sure, I'm glad I read the book, and at no time was I willing to put it down without finishing it, but it's a shame when the reading experience is tainted by impatience like that.
When I started this book, I was on an 18th Century kick (though written in 1824, the book is set mostly in 1704), which began with Tristram Shandy, and carried me through a re-watching of Barry Lyndon, as well as a few others.
Maybe my thinking here is influenced by having recently read Tristram Shandy, but in some ways this reads more like a contemporary novel than an 18th Cent. Scottish gothic novel. There's a weird theme of "doubling" here. People repeatedly have some sort of mirror images: the main character is presented as his brother's nemesis; at the same time he is paired with a shape-shifting figure who seems to be his spiritual twin, but who assumes the form of his brother. The first hundred or so pages of the novel are told in the third-person, from a perspective sympathetic the main character's brother. Most of the book, though, is a text-within-a-text, the "confessions," which begin by re-telling the same events from the protagonist's perspective. It's as though the character was a drop of ink on a page that is folded in half vertically, then horizontally, etc.
The protagonist here, a young man named Robert Wringham, is a religious zealot of the Antinomian variety. Apparently the doctrine of predestination was the subject of heated disagreement in early Eighteenth Century Scotland; Wringham is brought up in the radical fringe of Calvinism (I'm not clear what denomination this makes him, or if it's at all analogous to any contemporary church). Which, taken to its extreme, Calvinism is a kind of scary idea. Wringham is convinced of his status as one of the Elect. To him, the notion that his earthly deeds might cost him the Salvation that was ordained before Creation is the basest heresy. Thus Wringham is lead down the path to sin and murder by the Devil, who appears to him as a strange changeling whose beliefs about predestination exceed Wringham's own.
There's probably an apt literary category to deploy here. I don't know it. But I would place this book alongside other contemplative, psychological--not necessarily existential--works as Hunger, The Stranger, and Notes from Underground. Even though there is a fair amount of plot--murder, rivalry, demons--the primary focus remains on the narrator's deliberations. What makes this book more "readable" than many such books is its sparing use of humor (e.g., Wringham, told that his supernatural Tempter is "a prince," concludes he is in the presence of Peter I of Russia), as well as the equally-understated presence of the supernatural. Hogg rather nonchalantly inserts a downright Lovecraftian incident of demonic torment in the space of a page or so, before returning to an extended exploration of the narrator's doubts and vacillations.
I suppose I'm pretty big on brand-loyalty when it comes to publishers. This is the third book I've read from the NYRB Classics line, and I've been consistently impressed. They tend to select quality books, often in some degree of neglect. Their cover designs are great, as well as the little touches: typeface, paper weight, stiffness of cover. My favorite bit is the way the inside covers are always some vivid color, coordinated to the cover design.
This book had a brief glossary of archaic Scottish dialect in the back--Hogg, though Scottish himself, made his Scottish peasants sound more caricatured than Moira MacTaggert. The inclusion of a glossary made me pleasantly nostalgic for middle school Language Arts.
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