The Quincunx, written in 1989, is the ultimate Victorian novel, crammed with every last element of that genre: decrepit manor houses, rolling countrysides, untrustworthy and loyal servants, mysterious men in top hats, debtors prison, an abusive orphanage, even a lengthy and disgustingly described journey through the London sewers. The story begins while the protagonist, Johnnie, is still a young boy, living alone with his mother and their servants in an old house. Johnnie's life seems uneventful enough, but soon he realizes that he and his mother are actually in hiding, and that his mother is bearing some dark secret that their enemies would kill to get. And what is that secret? There's something about an old will; something about the inheritance of two families; and somewhere in between, with very little stake in the actual outcome but with the ability to drastically affect the lives of two very powerful groups of antagonists, is Johnnie and his mother. In very short order, the two of them are driven from their comfortable lives and enter into a downward spiral of oppression and terror that occupies the bulk of this densely packed 800-page novel.
Sympathy and frustration provide the narrative drive for most of The Quincunx. The sympathy comes from the misfortunes that Palliser almost sadistically heaps onto Johnnie and his mother. Believe me when I say that things do not ever get better for them--their travails go on and on and on and on, until it is almost unbearable to see them being tortured further by the heartless families who seek to exploit them. Sympathy also is due when you realize just how little Johnnie and his mother can expect to benefit, even in the best of all possible outcomes. Make no mistake: The Quincunx is a very dark novel, and quite depressing to read.
But there's also frustration, from the incredible stupidity and naivete exhibited both by Johnnie (in the beginning) and by his mother (throughout the book). Johnnie's original naivete can be excused as the innocence of a young boy; indeed, one of the more remarkable features of The Quincunx is its portrayal of a young boy who becomes increasingly worldly and cynical as the book progresses. Johnnie's mother, however, is hair-pullingly stupid from the beginning: overly sentimental, overly trusting, overly optimistic. In many ways, she is more of a child than Johnnie, something that Johnnie comes to realize in a pivotal moment that marks his transition from childhood to adolescence. And perhaps worse than a child as well: there is an element of madness in her single-minded idealism, to which tragedy inevitably attaches.
I began The Quincunx with absolutely no idea of its contents. And so it only became gradually apparent to me, as I read along, that The Quincunx is actually a mystery novel, and an exceedingly devious one as well. Perhaps I should begin with the title. A quincunx is a collection of five points, arranged as the four vertices of a square and a point in the center (like the number 5 on dice). The quincunx is a motif that appears throughout the book, most notably in its structure: the book has five parts, each with five subparts, and the middle part and subparts (the centers of the quincunxes) are all crucial turning points for the mystery (if not for the actual plot).
And what is that mystery? Here is the whole of it: Who is Johnnie's father, and what did he do on the night he fled? As you will see if you read the book, at the end of each part, Palliser helpfully includes an ever burgeoning family tree that indicates the relationships between the various protagonists and antagonists of the novel. As more and more information becomes revealed to Johnnie over the course of the book, the family tree becomes ever more filled out, until at the end of the book there is a seemingly complete tree. But here's the key: That tree, and all of the ones before it, is inaccurate. The clues that Johnnie receives (and there are plenty of them, believe me) are at best ambiguous. He interprets each of them one way, but there are various indications that his interpretations are incorrect, and though he valiantly attempts to correct his understanding with each contradiction he runs across, in the end the weight of the discrepancies topples his own neat theory. It doesn't help that Palliser, knowing that readers will be trying to puzzle through the family tree, delights in throwing a flood of deliberately ambiguous clues at us, including the masterpiece of a last sentence, whose two possible interpretations force a drastic reinterpretation of everything that has happened in the novel.
There is, of course, more to the mystery than that: What happened on the night of Johnnie's grandfather's death (if he really is Johnnie's grandfather)? What is in the section of the diary that Johnnie's mother burned and threw away? What is Uncle Martin's role in this story (and the family tree)? And so on.
The mystery is fiendishly convoluted, a truly enjoyable brain buster that, according to Palliser, is actually solveable based on the clues in the book alone. It is also unresolved at the novel's closing, requiring a second reading for any real illumination. (Indeed, as I mentioned before, Palliser goes out of his way to throw a wrench into any seemingly consistent theory with his very last sentence.) Focusing on the mystery of the novel helps allay some of the frustration about the abrupt ending of the actual plot: while you think there should be some resolution of Johnnie's inheritance, Palliser gives you almost none. But The Quincunx is too beautifully written and too cleverly scripted to let that minor fault hobble it.
Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu 