777 times lovelier than I'd ever seen
December 2003
December 26, 2003
The Quincunx
A quincunx is the arrangement of five items with four forming the corner of a square and the fifth centered between them, as with the pips on a die. Charles Palliser's The Quincunx is a book obsessed with the number five. It is made up of five parts, each composed of five books, each composed of five chapters; it tells the story of five doomed generations of five branches on a family tree. I'm not sure whether Palliser had crazy Oulipo-esque mirrorings, where as you dig further into the structure each whole element reveals itself to be five smaller components, but I wouldn't put it past him; the figure of the quincunx (and quincunxes of quincunxes) is itself a major plot point on at least three occasions. But beyond the formal gameplaying, The Quincunx is mostly an unashamed page-turner. Its hero, John Mellamphy, begins the novel as an upper-class child in the rural England of the early nineteenth century, but he does not stay there for long. His mother (a widow, or so she claims) is vague about her past; she believes that there is some sort of conspiracy against them that revolves around a mysterious document in her possession and her unnamed enemies who would kill to obtain it. Her predictions are, of course, accurate, and the Mellamphy household suffers a number of reversals, slipping into direst penury in the slums of London. From there, it's a whirlwind tour of lost wills, buried family scandals, insane asylums, arguments about the morality of law and man's innate nature, gangs of criminals, murder plots, fallen women, low humor among the servant class, dark doings in the London sewers, stock fraud, mad aunts, thwarted romance, &c. The first thirty pages or so were slow going, and I found myself asking why my friend recommended this so highly. Everything after that was a wonderful blur; it's all of Dickens (of whom I am not fond, but after this I am considering giving Bleak House another try) put through a blender and then cranked up to 11. Yummy good fun, and the perfect beach book for the howling winter months.
