Nigel Frith

This book has been lurking on my shelves for nearly 30 years, so I thought it was about time I read it. It is very much an Oxford novel: in fact, it is almost claustrophobically Oxfordian, being set entirely between Magdalen College (coyly named "St Mary's" but not otherwise disguised), the Botanic Garden, and an old house on Boar's Hill, with a brief excursion to a student house in the heart of North Oxford. Like Penelope Lively's The House in Norham Gardens, it seeks to break out of this stuffy enclosure by drawing on the imperial resonances of Oxford as a great, if dusty, museum of lost culture and mausoleum of intellectual endeavours. (Although entitled Snow, the book seems almost as much concerned with dust.)

The central character, an English undergraduate incongruously named O'Ryan (explained feebly as an allusion to Arion), is a romantic idiot who thinks he is a "born poet", at variance with the modernist and deconstructionist critical culture of late 20th century Oxford. His slightly underwhelming lyrical rhymed verse is sprinkled throughout the book, making it hard to separate him from the author, whose first name he shares. The whole tale is a satire of the conflict between Classical and Modern traditions in Oxford literary culture (as a microcosm of Western civilization), and the book is heavy with reminiscences of the posturing young heroes of G.K. Chesterton's novels, the machinating dons of C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, the cryptic symbolism of George McDonald, and the dense, archaic literariness of E.R. Eddison. Alongside O'Ryan's struggle with the rigid anti-classicism of the Oxford mainstream lies the debate about whether to build an extension to the College in a Modern or a Neoclassical style: this, I suspect, was a hot issue when the book was written.

It is not entirely clear, to one only marginally acquainted with those volcanic debates between Oxford literary cliques, whether Frith seeks to identify with or to commend the supposedly novel but ignored analytic methods of the mysterious Dr Maeonides, or his unfashionable anti-feminist theories of culture. The aesthetic which lies to the fore is notionally classical, but it is the classicism of the late 19th century, the Chaucer of William Morris, the Sappho of Bliss Carman, so that "classical" and "romantic" seem two sides of the same coin even as the rebellion of Romanticism is blamed for the disintegration of culture into Modernism. (I do, though, sympathise with O'Ryan's impatience with reading great literary works of the past solely as commentaries on modern issues, whether the distorting lens be Freudian, Marxist, or whatever.)

The book's prose style is tangled, the diction self-consciously poetic, sometimes practically Dickensian. It generally works in the context, but - holy moly! - the man seriously needed a better editor! I stumbled up against "allusion" misused for "illusion", "jam" for "jamb", "poured" for "pored", "decrepid" for "decrepit" (twice), plus several gratuitous misspellings and typos ("ballustrades", "imprisonned") and a curious use of "corruscate" [sic] apparently in error for "excoriate". Dr Murray's Dictionary does not acknowledge the existence of the verb "to boister", and though it shows a respectable enough attestation of "twangle" among 19th-century worthies from Scott to Tennyson, once was perhaps enough in reviving it here. A decent editor might also have dissuaded the author from twice rather grotesquely likening the smooth oval face of a beautiful young lady to a partly-sucked sweet (either a sugared almond or a butterscotch, for variety).

(As an aside, I would note, against the Lewisian or Eddisonian misogyny of Dr Maeonides's thesis, that the error lies in identifying the spirits of Classical and Romantic as respectively masculine and feminine, implying the usual facile equation with male and female. The ancients did not make that mistake: the balance can just as well be stated in terms of Apollo and Dionysus - both male - or Artemis and Aphrodite - both female.)

Essentially, the book asks whether the last of the abandoned Muses might be given back her voice by some lone poet in this barbarian age. I am not convinced that either O'Ryan or Frith succeed in this noble quest, but I did have some fun watching them try.

MB 13-xi-2023… (meer)