INCLINE OUR HEARTS

by A.N. Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1988

Biographer of Belloc, Milton, and Tolstoy, Wilson explores the problems of the genre in this amusing novel of manners, a briskly paced fiction of gentle wit and subtle moral force. Given shape by the life of the narrator, this contemporary coming-of-age story also succeeds as a modern spiritual autobiography. Julian Ramsay, orphaned in his youth, grows up in a Norfolk village where his Uncle Roy, the local vicar, tends to a few provincial souls. Joined in ""mutual discontent"" with his wife, Julian's Aunt Deirdre, the pompous clergyman shares with his nephew an obsession with the Lampitt family, only one of whom lives in the family manse, Timplingham Place. The besotted Sargie Lampitt instills in Julian's uncle a reverence for his family's lore, a compendium of anecdotes rehearsed time and again for anyone who'll listen. Early on, Julian is sentenced to the ""English Gulag,"" the boarding schools where deprivation and hardship reign. ""Tyranny, persecution, and sexual perversion"" rule his elementary education in a school run by a violent pederast. Julian's misery is relieved by the antics of his pal Miles Darnley, and by his passion for the toothsome art teacher, a young woman affianced to a mysterious character named Raphael Hunter. Hunter proves to be a predator indeed when he reappears, late in Julian's life, as the lover of Julian's cousin Felicity, the ""grotesquely misnamed daughter"" of his Uncle Roy and Aunt Deirdre. All of Hunter's manipulations serve a clear purpose--he manages to become the biographer of James Petworth Lampitt, Sargie's brother, and a belle-lettrist of minor fame. In secondary school, Julian falls under the spell of Petworth's purple prose, his arch and campy books on Prince Albert, Swinburne, and the like. Meanwhile, Hunter, whose mystery is left intact by the end of the novel, has visions of best-sellerdom, even if it means inventing a more salacious past for the homosexual Petworth. When Julian finally wakes from the nightmare of childhood, he's wiser and more forgiving, if not ready to head the religious imperative of the title. With many a well-turned phrase and much narrative grace, Wilson performs this fictional act of contrition.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988

Categories: FICTION