Status
Available
Call number
Series
Collection
Publication
Ballantine Books (1990), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 800 pages
Description
A young man searching for his origins is drawn from the Northern England countryside into the violent and corrupt London underworld of the late Regency.
Media reviews
'"The Quincunx" deserves the hoopla; it's an astonishing imitation, a Borgesian feat of sustained imaginative anachronism, the fictional equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg.'
"Quintuple the length of the ordinary novel, this extraordinary tour de force also has five times the ordinary allotment of adventure, action and aplomb."
"Palliser's first novel is an extraordinary achievement: a triple-decker (800-page) Victorian pastiche, obviously modeled on Bleak House, unfolding the staggeringly complex tale of young John Huffam's attempts to ward off ruin and death until he can solve multiple family mysteries."
User reviews
LibraryThing member ecw0647
The quincunx is an arrangement of five items in a square based on a cross that was used for several five-domed Byzantine churches. It's also a terribly important design in a novel of five parts by Charles Palliser that is absolutely riveting. Set in England during the early nineteenth century, it
Palliser did extensive research into the period, and intricate detail lends marvelously to the setting. And what an environment. A rigid class system prevented any kind of upward social mobility. Women were to be seen, not heard. They had no skills, were prevented from getting any, and when destitute, turned to prostitution as virtually their only means of survival. Greed and corruption were pervasive.
Intricate legal mechanisms were devised by rich landowners to deprive the poor of whatever little land they owned; more machinations made things worse by driving the price o flab or down. "Close towns" were created by buying up "freeholders," whose houses were then destroyed; only certain people were then allowed to live in the new cottages that were built. This meant the landowner did not have to "pay the paritch," a form of tax that was used to provide welfare for the completely indigent, of which there were many.
Some of the jobs the poor were forced into are graphically depicted. The "shore-hunters," for example, climbed down into the sewers at night during low tide, working their way through the labyrinth of tunnels underneath London to the spots where the sewers washed most of their detritus. This was picked through for whatever coins might have fallen down drain holes and been swept toward the river by the rain. It was filthy, dangerous (the tides were capricious and one did not dare to be caught underground at high tide) and not very rewarding. Often it was all there was. If a dead body was found, it was the custom not to strip it for anything valuable (like clothes), because after the body washed into the river it would be scavenged by those who eked out their living in such a manner. Stripping the body would be considered "robbing them of their trade."
John finally learns the secrets of the wills and codicils and the details of the murder that had haunted his family. Beware! Once begun, this book is difficult to put down. It will also make you want to dig out Dickens again.
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is narrated by a child whose age we are never told, even as he grows older. His name changes also as he realizes he has been hidden to protect his life, for he is the direct descendant of a wealthy landowner who left him everything in a will and a peculiar codicil, and the land will revert to others upon his death. Palliser's book makes a grand Dickensian sweep through the slums and ballrooms of Victorian England. John begins to piece together the puzzle, but only after he and his mother are manipulated and schemed out of everything they own Friends turn out to be enemies and ostensible enemies become friends in a topsy-turvy world. Palliser did extensive research into the period, and intricate detail lends marvelously to the setting. And what an environment. A rigid class system prevented any kind of upward social mobility. Women were to be seen, not heard. They had no skills, were prevented from getting any, and when destitute, turned to prostitution as virtually their only means of survival. Greed and corruption were pervasive.
Intricate legal mechanisms were devised by rich landowners to deprive the poor of whatever little land they owned; more machinations made things worse by driving the price o flab or down. "Close towns" were created by buying up "freeholders," whose houses were then destroyed; only certain people were then allowed to live in the new cottages that were built. This meant the landowner did not have to "pay the paritch," a form of tax that was used to provide welfare for the completely indigent, of which there were many.
Some of the jobs the poor were forced into are graphically depicted. The "shore-hunters," for example, climbed down into the sewers at night during low tide, working their way through the labyrinth of tunnels underneath London to the spots where the sewers washed most of their detritus. This was picked through for whatever coins might have fallen down drain holes and been swept toward the river by the rain. It was filthy, dangerous (the tides were capricious and one did not dare to be caught underground at high tide) and not very rewarding. Often it was all there was. If a dead body was found, it was the custom not to strip it for anything valuable (like clothes), because after the body washed into the river it would be scavenged by those who eked out their living in such a manner. Stripping the body would be considered "robbing them of their trade."
John finally learns the secrets of the wills and codicils and the details of the murder that had haunted his family. Beware! Once begun, this book is difficult to put down. It will also make you want to dig out Dickens again.
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LibraryThing member cabegley
This book is so plot-driven that I hesitate to give much information, but suffice it to say that young John moves from the remote North countryside to London to try to discover the truth about his origins, slowly uncovering clues about an inheritance that may or may not rightfully belong to him. We
I was completely absorbed by this book, staying up several nights for hours past my usual bedtime in order to read just a little more. My heart raced for the last hour or so--when's the last time a book did that for me? The plotting is incredibly convoluted (at some point, I wished I had kept notes), but it all ties together beautifully. There is a wealth of period detail--apparently, Palliser spent twelve years researching--all of which weaves seamlessly into the story.
Readers may be put off by the length--my hardcover copy is 788 pages of small type--but those who take it on will be amply rewarded. A highly recommended read!
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travel with John all over London (and underneath it), encountering company both high and low.I was completely absorbed by this book, staying up several nights for hours past my usual bedtime in order to read just a little more. My heart raced for the last hour or so--when's the last time a book did that for me? The plotting is incredibly convoluted (at some point, I wished I had kept notes), but it all ties together beautifully. There is a wealth of period detail--apparently, Palliser spent twelve years researching--all of which weaves seamlessly into the story.
Readers may be put off by the length--my hardcover copy is 788 pages of small type--but those who take it on will be amply rewarded. A highly recommended read!
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LibraryThing member bibliobeck
I love this book! It's a mathematical/historical mystery and so much more. It really needs reading with a notepad by your side which I intend to do on the second reading. I became so enthralled that I was reading late into the night (and early into the morning). I've just ordered The Unburied and
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have very high expectations. Show Less
LibraryThing member BeyondEdenRock
The Quincunx is an enticing, entrancing recreation of a Victorian novel, written in such perfect period prose and holding so much that is typical of the Victorian novel that you might well believe that Charles Palliser had excavated it and not sat down to write late in the twentieth century.
I
The story begins with a young boy, named John, who lives with his mother, Mary, in an English village. They are not wealthy but they are not poor either, and so they are able to live quietly and quite comfortably. As he grows up John comes to realise that the way they live is not normal and that his mother is keeping secrets; that there must be reasons why she is so very protective of him, why he isn’t allowed to play with other children, why anyone who comes to their door is unwelcome.
When a relative he has never met dies – and after he has broken more than one of his mother’s rules – things go terribly wrong for Mary and John. They lose what small capital they had, Mary comes to believe that they are no longer safe in their home, and so mother and son set out for London.
Things go wrong again, and Mary does not know who they can trust; who is really her friend and who is in the employ of the man she believes to be her enemy?
The plot is much too elaborate to explain, but it spins around a simple scrap of paper: the codicil to a will written half a century earlier. The will and the codicil had implications for five families; they had been written for unhappy reasons in unhappy circumstances, and they had created greed, hatred, madness and murder in five generations. They affected John, but he didn’t know how, he didn’t who his father was, and he didn’t know who his friends and enemies were.
He did know that he was in danger, caught in a complicated conspiracy, and that he had to work out how to survive and claim the inheritance that he believed was his.
Every kind of character, every scenario, every setting, you might think of finding in a Victorian novel is to be found in this book.
Sometimes the plot lingers, but I found the details of day to day living and how practical problems were faced quite fascinating. At other times it rattles along, almost so quickly that I wished I might have spent a little more time with some places and people, though what happened next always captured my interest and didn’t allow me to miss the things that had gone by.
The plot is relentless, always focused on John’s story; mainly through his own first person account, broken only when he hears the stories of others and when an omniscient narrator steps from the shadows to show scenes that will affect John’s progress.
It’s construction is so elaborate and so clever.
The atmosphere is wonderful, and this really is the perfect book for dark winter evenings.
Imagine that Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens sat down together with all of the time in the world to create a masterpiece, drawing on their own greatest works and the great works of their contemporaries, each writing to their strengths and reining in the other’s weaknesses, and trying things they has never tried before, to wonderful effect.
This feels a little like that.
There really is everything you could want in a Victorian novel, and I caught echoes of many beloved stories. And then there are things that feel a little more modern but work so well: a narrator who may not be wholly reliable, questions that are left unanswered, an ending that lets the reader draw their own conclusion, and a structure that slowly moves into the light ….
There are five related families over five generations, whose five crests form a quincunx, an arrangement of five objects with one in each corner of a square and one at the centre. The novel itself is divided into five parts, and each part is divided into five books and then five chapters.
There are so many small but significant details. I spotted some of them but I am sure that I missed others, and that this is a novel that would reveal much more on a second reading.
It has failings. John and Mary could both, for different reasons, be infuriating. Occasionally a character or a situation was compromised a little for the sake of the plot. The later chapters were less subtle than what had come before. There was at least one unanswered question that needed an answer: the question of John’s parentage.
But, as a whole, The Quincunx worked wonderfully well.
It is more a book for the head than a book for the heat.
And yet I loved that quite near the end I came to realise that it was also a coming of age story.
I read it much more quickly that I thought I would. I had to keep turning the pages. I was intrigued. I had to know. I couldn’t quite explain how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together, but I have a good idea, and I think that it works.
I was completely caught up in the world of this book, I miss it now that it is over, and I can’t help wondering about the lives of many of the characters I met beyond the pages of the book.
I
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skated around it for quite some time, because it is such a very big book, and I read a couple of the author’s later, shorter works; but now that I have read this book I have to say that completely outclasses them.The story begins with a young boy, named John, who lives with his mother, Mary, in an English village. They are not wealthy but they are not poor either, and so they are able to live quietly and quite comfortably. As he grows up John comes to realise that the way they live is not normal and that his mother is keeping secrets; that there must be reasons why she is so very protective of him, why he isn’t allowed to play with other children, why anyone who comes to their door is unwelcome.
When a relative he has never met dies – and after he has broken more than one of his mother’s rules – things go terribly wrong for Mary and John. They lose what small capital they had, Mary comes to believe that they are no longer safe in their home, and so mother and son set out for London.
Things go wrong again, and Mary does not know who they can trust; who is really her friend and who is in the employ of the man she believes to be her enemy?
The plot is much too elaborate to explain, but it spins around a simple scrap of paper: the codicil to a will written half a century earlier. The will and the codicil had implications for five families; they had been written for unhappy reasons in unhappy circumstances, and they had created greed, hatred, madness and murder in five generations. They affected John, but he didn’t know how, he didn’t who his father was, and he didn’t know who his friends and enemies were.
He did know that he was in danger, caught in a complicated conspiracy, and that he had to work out how to survive and claim the inheritance that he believed was his.
Every kind of character, every scenario, every setting, you might think of finding in a Victorian novel is to be found in this book.
Sometimes the plot lingers, but I found the details of day to day living and how practical problems were faced quite fascinating. At other times it rattles along, almost so quickly that I wished I might have spent a little more time with some places and people, though what happened next always captured my interest and didn’t allow me to miss the things that had gone by.
The plot is relentless, always focused on John’s story; mainly through his own first person account, broken only when he hears the stories of others and when an omniscient narrator steps from the shadows to show scenes that will affect John’s progress.
It’s construction is so elaborate and so clever.
The atmosphere is wonderful, and this really is the perfect book for dark winter evenings.
Imagine that Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens sat down together with all of the time in the world to create a masterpiece, drawing on their own greatest works and the great works of their contemporaries, each writing to their strengths and reining in the other’s weaknesses, and trying things they has never tried before, to wonderful effect.
This feels a little like that.
There really is everything you could want in a Victorian novel, and I caught echoes of many beloved stories. And then there are things that feel a little more modern but work so well: a narrator who may not be wholly reliable, questions that are left unanswered, an ending that lets the reader draw their own conclusion, and a structure that slowly moves into the light ….
There are five related families over five generations, whose five crests form a quincunx, an arrangement of five objects with one in each corner of a square and one at the centre. The novel itself is divided into five parts, and each part is divided into five books and then five chapters.
There are so many small but significant details. I spotted some of them but I am sure that I missed others, and that this is a novel that would reveal much more on a second reading.
It has failings. John and Mary could both, for different reasons, be infuriating. Occasionally a character or a situation was compromised a little for the sake of the plot. The later chapters were less subtle than what had come before. There was at least one unanswered question that needed an answer: the question of John’s parentage.
But, as a whole, The Quincunx worked wonderfully well.
It is more a book for the head than a book for the heat.
And yet I loved that quite near the end I came to realise that it was also a coming of age story.
I read it much more quickly that I thought I would. I had to keep turning the pages. I was intrigued. I had to know. I couldn’t quite explain how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together, but I have a good idea, and I think that it works.
I was completely caught up in the world of this book, I miss it now that it is over, and I can’t help wondering about the lives of many of the characters I met beyond the pages of the book.
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LibraryThing member stuart10er
As slow as this read was for me, it was an easy read - although I really only got pulled into it after about half way. This book is written in the style of Dickens and other Victorian era writers - of which this writer is a scholar in. He succeeds well. Although it seemed like a pastiche of Dickens
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rather than something that he would have written. The characters don't have the same Romantic era exaggeration of Good or Evil. Most of the characters are very modernly drawn in grey rather than a Dickensian Black and White. That being said, the story of a boy involved in a five-family inheritance fight and all the people impacted by it before finally being resolved is more convuluted and involved more characters than I think Dickens would have been prepared to write. As a serial novelist - I think he would have worried that his audience would become lost - as I was a few times - but it is well written enough that I wasn't lost for long. I also thought that the "moral" of the story was also drawn too lightly for Dickens. Dickens would have piled it on thickly. So, this seemed like a Victorian story with Victorian style and characters - but told by a modern person for a modern audience. Still, I enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who loves Dickens. If you hate Dickens, you will probably hate this one too. Show Less
LibraryThing member pajarita
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This book of course sets out to recreate a traditional nineteenth century novel. The language, the plot curves, the characters, the settings, these elements all work admirably towards that end. If you are transported by historically accurate
There are also very compelling studies in pre-Victorian class structure, economy, and land speculation--with its attendant side effects and spin offs.
Many of the characters are well defined and endearing. So the cumulative whole of this book is worth your time.
But I, myself, have never been a big fan of mysteries; and although this book aspires to be more than simply a classic of the mystery genre, there are enough of the plot systems required for a mystery, included in this book, for [book:The Quincunx|824986] to be compared effectively to that literary convention. And what I have always found tedious in mysteries is the denouement: that gathering in parlour while the great detective explains, to us, that “…the maidservant couldn’t possibly have killed the Viscount because she was in the conservatory while….”
Well about two-thirds of the way into this large book, an exhaustive sequence of denouements begins.
“Ah ha! So the countess was really the same woman who……….”
“So Exeter is really the grandson of……..”
“So the reason that Charles left the banquet so early was……”
These start slowly at first; but occur more frequently, and accelerate manically as the conclusion approaches. And because the plot twists, the mysteries, and the revelations are so labyrinthine—so, therefore, are the denouements. And, therefore, these explications become numerous, frequent, and tedious.
But many readers, I am certain, will very much enjoy the unraveling of this complex puzzle. And this process allowed a thorough and admirable investigation into human motivations and the results of our actions.
So for me this was not what I expected, but a worthwhile read. And it was tedious at times.
This book of course sets out to recreate a traditional nineteenth century novel. The language, the plot curves, the characters, the settings, these elements all work admirably towards that end. If you are transported by historically accurate
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nineteenth century details; if you love very, very complex mysteries; if intrigues and the Gordian knots of family genealogies lure you; if the you are charmed by the reconstruction of pre-Victorian plot conventions, this book is definitely for you. The obvious scholarship that went into this work is clearly impressive.There are also very compelling studies in pre-Victorian class structure, economy, and land speculation--with its attendant side effects and spin offs.
Many of the characters are well defined and endearing. So the cumulative whole of this book is worth your time.
But I, myself, have never been a big fan of mysteries; and although this book aspires to be more than simply a classic of the mystery genre, there are enough of the plot systems required for a mystery, included in this book, for [book:The Quincunx|824986] to be compared effectively to that literary convention. And what I have always found tedious in mysteries is the denouement: that gathering in parlour while the great detective explains, to us, that “…the maidservant couldn’t possibly have killed the Viscount because she was in the conservatory while….”
Well about two-thirds of the way into this large book, an exhaustive sequence of denouements begins.
“Ah ha! So the countess was really the same woman who……….”
“So Exeter is really the grandson of……..”
“So the reason that Charles left the banquet so early was……”
These start slowly at first; but occur more frequently, and accelerate manically as the conclusion approaches. And because the plot twists, the mysteries, and the revelations are so labyrinthine—so, therefore, are the denouements. And, therefore, these explications become numerous, frequent, and tedious.
But many readers, I am certain, will very much enjoy the unraveling of this complex puzzle. And this process allowed a thorough and admirable investigation into human motivations and the results of our actions.
So for me this was not what I expected, but a worthwhile read. And it was tedious at times.
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LibraryThing member KateSherrod
I suppose we could regard Charles Palliser's Quincunx as final proof that for every genre or great genre master of fiction, however obscure or archaic, there is not only someone who will attempt a pastiche of it/him, but sometimes there is even one who is very, very good at it. Charles Palliser is
I didn't know there could be such a thing. Did you?
For Quincunx* is a Dickensian pastiche of the very highest order, though it goes Dickens one better, or at least earlier, by setting itself in Britain's late Regency (and therefore pre-Victorian by a good bit) period. And perhaps it takes the Dickens to 11 at the very least, both in terms of legal/inheritance wrangling as plot driver and of risible degrees and numbers of coincidences at least in that Dickens' and Palliser's Londons have hilariously small populations.
And there is still more to keep the 21st century reader chuckling, for about halfway through, when a certain heraldry puzzle assumes paramount importance, the penny drops and one realizes she is in fact reading a high quality prose version of a hidden object game. All that is missing is the frustrating experience of "breaking" the cursor by mis-clicking on too many objects, but then again, that could be substituted for by our young hero's continually narrowly escaping yet another assassination attempt -- or only sort of escaping, continually forced as he is to more or less respawn as the penniless, near-helpless, delerious, paranoid, starving waif that he is for most of the novel.
And why is this so? Because, as I said, property inheritance and greed are the great drivers of the plot. An ancient francophone family (lots of glorious surnames feature in this story: Umphraville, Palphramond, Mompesson!) whose possession of a profitable estate dates back, apparently, to the time of William the Conqueror and whose bloodline includes Plantagenet ancestry, fell on hard times a few generations before our hero (John Mellamphy, he who answers to oh so many other names as he grows up) was born has been shadow-fighting over different versions of the patriarch's will in addition to publicly battling it out in the Court of Chancery (shades of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, eh wot?). Depending on what document finally surfaces and is approved, one family could be turned off the estate in favor of, well, several others.
The plot is intricate and small details matter; like in playing a hidden object game, we have to scrutinize every scene with care, somewhat hampered by our guide through all of this, John of the Many Surnames, from whom Secrets Have Been Kept and whose life is perpetually both endangered and protected by different interests, depending on which will from which they would benefit.
All this and all the Dickensian social justice hand-wringing you could ask for, as we spend time with body snatchers, dishonest bankers and lawyers, out-and-out bandit gangs, "down below men" who make their living salvaging coins and other valuables that have fallen into the sewers, starving Victorian garment workers, and, every once in a while, the gentry living high and betting too much on cards and horses. Like you do.
If that sounds like something you might enjoy, you'll enjoy the hell out of this book. I did, even though I snickered a lot. Hey, snickering is good.
*And I absolutely wound up reading this one now because of Aliette de Bodard, whose Obsidian and Blood Aztec godpunk trilogy employs the visual device and term of "quincunx" - a five-fold cross, more or less - and every time I came across the term, I remembered that my mother had presented me with a battered but still nice hardcover edition of Quincunx and it was still the substantial base of my small but formidable tower of dead tree TBR. Brains are funny old things.
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one of these, an otaku's otaku in the realm of... the nineteenth century social novel?I didn't know there could be such a thing. Did you?
For Quincunx* is a Dickensian pastiche of the very highest order, though it goes Dickens one better, or at least earlier, by setting itself in Britain's late Regency (and therefore pre-Victorian by a good bit) period. And perhaps it takes the Dickens to 11 at the very least, both in terms of legal/inheritance wrangling as plot driver and of risible degrees and numbers of coincidences at least in that Dickens' and Palliser's Londons have hilariously small populations.
And there is still more to keep the 21st century reader chuckling, for about halfway through, when a certain heraldry puzzle assumes paramount importance, the penny drops and one realizes she is in fact reading a high quality prose version of a hidden object game. All that is missing is the frustrating experience of "breaking" the cursor by mis-clicking on too many objects, but then again, that could be substituted for by our young hero's continually narrowly escaping yet another assassination attempt -- or only sort of escaping, continually forced as he is to more or less respawn as the penniless, near-helpless, delerious, paranoid, starving waif that he is for most of the novel.
And why is this so? Because, as I said, property inheritance and greed are the great drivers of the plot. An ancient francophone family (lots of glorious surnames feature in this story: Umphraville, Palphramond, Mompesson!) whose possession of a profitable estate dates back, apparently, to the time of William the Conqueror and whose bloodline includes Plantagenet ancestry, fell on hard times a few generations before our hero (John Mellamphy, he who answers to oh so many other names as he grows up) was born has been shadow-fighting over different versions of the patriarch's will in addition to publicly battling it out in the Court of Chancery (shades of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, eh wot?). Depending on what document finally surfaces and is approved, one family could be turned off the estate in favor of, well, several others.
The plot is intricate and small details matter; like in playing a hidden object game, we have to scrutinize every scene with care, somewhat hampered by our guide through all of this, John of the Many Surnames, from whom Secrets Have Been Kept and whose life is perpetually both endangered and protected by different interests, depending on which will from which they would benefit.
All this and all the Dickensian social justice hand-wringing you could ask for, as we spend time with body snatchers, dishonest bankers and lawyers, out-and-out bandit gangs, "down below men" who make their living salvaging coins and other valuables that have fallen into the sewers, starving Victorian garment workers, and, every once in a while, the gentry living high and betting too much on cards and horses. Like you do.
If that sounds like something you might enjoy, you'll enjoy the hell out of this book. I did, even though I snickered a lot. Hey, snickering is good.
*And I absolutely wound up reading this one now because of Aliette de Bodard, whose Obsidian and Blood Aztec godpunk trilogy employs the visual device and term of "quincunx" - a five-fold cross, more or less - and every time I came across the term, I remembered that my mother had presented me with a battered but still nice hardcover edition of Quincunx and it was still the substantial base of my small but formidable tower of dead tree TBR. Brains are funny old things.
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LibraryThing member isabelx
This is a pastiche of an early Victorian novel, complete with archaic words and quaint spellings, but the author goes into details about things that a Victorian author would not have, such as the squalid lives of the London poor, body-snatching and prostitution.
One of the most interesting things
slang; blunt for money, flatt for fool, fakement for job (as in a criminal undertaking), pinked for stabbed and prigged for stole.
John's mother is a particularly poor speller. When she wrote in her letters for John that the Clothiers were not 'gentile' enough for Nick Clothier to be a good match in marriage for her great-aunt, I thought it was a misspelling and she meant 'genteel'. But later on there are enough hints to make it clear that the Clothiers were of Jewish origin, so did Mary mean gentile after all, or did she mean genteel but make a Freudian slip in her letter, or maybe this is a pun put in deliberately by the author.
In the Afterword, Charles Palliser mentions the book that first got him interested in the plight of the poor in Victorian times when he read it as a child. It was called "London Labour and the London Poor" and contained firsthand accounts of the lives of the poor in London, collected by Henry Mayhew who to start his work by the novels of Charles Dickens. It sounds like a fascinating read - if it's not still in print, I'll have to look on abebooks to see whether it's available second-hand.
The most interesting of the jobs described in the Quincunx is when John is working the shores with Mr Digweed and Joey. He assumes that 'working the shores' means beachcombing along the river at low tide. However he finds that the toshers' job is much more dangerous than that, as the shores that they search for lost coins and other valuables are actually the sewers deep below London, so amongst other dangers they are risking tunnel collapses and being caught underground by the incoming tide or a rainstorm.
I was still confused having read all 1100+ pages plus the author's afterword.
Skip the rest of my reviews iif you haven't read the book, as my ramblings about possible solutions to the mystery will make no sense to you anyway.
As you read this book, you realise that there are no coincidences. Almost everyone John meets is linked to the mysterious conspiracies surrounding him, but there is always a logical link from one acquaintance to the next.
In the afterword Charles Palliser mentions the Swedish translator's problem with the last sentence, due to Swedish having separate words for maternal (morfar) and paternal (farfar) grandfather. Next time I'm in Sweden I'll have to have a look in a bookshop and just read the last sentence to see which word he decided to use.
At the beginning of the book, I suspected that John's mother's father was also (incestuously) John's father, due to her embarrassment and confusion every time there was a verbal father/grandfather confusion and when people commented on how much John looked like him. However, later on I changed my mind and anyway that would not fit in with the final sentence at all.
Lydia's lover was killed by Jeoffrey Escreet, so according to the final sentence of the story, he has to be John's grandfather. This would rule out Peter Clothier as John's father. He and John's mother Mary were only married for about a day before he was arrested and committed to the asylum, and from Mary's account there didn't seem to have been time for them to consummate the marriage. However there is always the possibility that they didn't wait until they were married and she wouldn't actually have mentioned the consummation in a letter to her son anyway. So it's possible that John's suspicions are entirely unfounded and that his father is in fact his mother's husband, Peter Clothier. In that case John is wrong about Jeoffrey Escreet being his grandfather and the final sentence of the novel is false.
If JE is John's morfar, then he must be Mary's real father (which is possible because her supposed father John, had lived in JE's house since before he was married and Mary was brought up there). As JE was related to Mary's supposed father there could still have been a ressemblance between John Jr & John Sr, or it could have been that the people who made the remarks knew that JE was Mary's real father and were being catty, which would explain why Mary blushed.
On the other hand, if JE is John's farfar, then John's father could either be John Sr. (my first suspicion), or Martin Fortisquence. JE invited them to live with him when they finished university, and was very fond of them both. John Sr. returned his love but Martin never did, which could possibly be because he knew or at least suspected that JE was his father and resented him for this.
I think (but I could be wrong about this) that it said at some point that John Sr. and Martin looked like each other, which could only be explained if it was Martin who was JE's son, as otherwise he would not be related to John Sr. Oh bother - it's just occurred to me that maybe they are both JE's sons. Both their mothers would have known JE, so it is possible.
If Martin is John's father it would explain Jemima F's hostility to Mary, which seemed too extreme to be explained by being jealous of Mary's wealth when they were children. This is another possible explanation for her catty remarks about who John took after in looks. It would explain why Martin supported Mary financially and protected her and John from their enemies, but I'm surprised that he would have left his son nothing in his will, unless that was the price he paid to placate his wife. It also fits in with Mr Advowson's information about John's baptism.
The people who could have told John the truth are frankly unhelpful. John remembered that Mary had written "I could not bear to think that the father of my child had killed my Papa", but that is no help at all, since Jeoffrey Escreet, Peter Clothier & Martin Fortisquence were all in the house on the night of the murder.
Jemima told John "I never believed that the murderer was your father", which is too obscure by half, as I can't tell who she thinks the father was or who she thinks the murderer was, or even whether she knows the identity of either for certain or is just guessing. However, I can't understand why John does not press her about this, as she is very possibly the only person alive who may be able to answer his questions.
Tentative conclusions
I am leaning towards Jeoffrey Escreet being John's farfar and Martin Fortisquence being his father, but John misinterpreted so many clues throughout the book, that my secondary theory is that Peter Clothier is his father.
Sometime very soon I am going to have to read the whole book again and look out for more clues. In such a long book (the story ends on page 1191), it's really hard to flick through and find the bits I want to check again.
A loose end.
What happened to Lydia's baby? Did it die as she was told, or did I miss a clue and it was adopted like JE was a generation earlier? Oh, I just thought, in the afterword it says that there are clues to suggest that the Digweeds are also related to John, so maybe there's a link there, as I didn't pick up on that at all
One of the most interesting things
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about "The Quincunx" is that it is written as if it is a real early 19th century novel. There are obsolete spellings; sopha for sofa, clew for clue and lanthorn for lantern, and archaicslang; blunt for money, flatt for fool, fakement for job (as in a criminal undertaking), pinked for stabbed and prigged for stole.
John's mother is a particularly poor speller. When she wrote in her letters for John that the Clothiers were not 'gentile' enough for Nick Clothier to be a good match in marriage for her great-aunt, I thought it was a misspelling and she meant 'genteel'. But later on there are enough hints to make it clear that the Clothiers were of Jewish origin, so did Mary mean gentile after all, or did she mean genteel but make a Freudian slip in her letter, or maybe this is a pun put in deliberately by the author.
In the Afterword, Charles Palliser mentions the book that first got him interested in the plight of the poor in Victorian times when he read it as a child. It was called "London Labour and the London Poor" and contained firsthand accounts of the lives of the poor in London, collected by Henry Mayhew who to start his work by the novels of Charles Dickens. It sounds like a fascinating read - if it's not still in print, I'll have to look on abebooks to see whether it's available second-hand.
The most interesting of the jobs described in the Quincunx is when John is working the shores with Mr Digweed and Joey. He assumes that 'working the shores' means beachcombing along the river at low tide. However he finds that the toshers' job is much more dangerous than that, as the shores that they search for lost coins and other valuables are actually the sewers deep below London, so amongst other dangers they are risking tunnel collapses and being caught underground by the incoming tide or a rainstorm.
I was still confused having read all 1100+ pages plus the author's afterword.
Skip the rest of my reviews iif you haven't read the book, as my ramblings about possible solutions to the mystery will make no sense to you anyway.
As you read this book, you realise that there are no coincidences. Almost everyone John meets is linked to the mysterious conspiracies surrounding him, but there is always a logical link from one acquaintance to the next.
In the afterword Charles Palliser mentions the Swedish translator's problem with the last sentence, due to Swedish having separate words for maternal (morfar) and paternal (farfar) grandfather. Next time I'm in Sweden I'll have to have a look in a bookshop and just read the last sentence to see which word he decided to use.
At the beginning of the book, I suspected that John's mother's father was also (incestuously) John's father, due to her embarrassment and confusion every time there was a verbal father/grandfather confusion and when people commented on how much John looked like him. However, later on I changed my mind and anyway that would not fit in with the final sentence at all.
Lydia's lover was killed by Jeoffrey Escreet, so according to the final sentence of the story, he has to be John's grandfather. This would rule out Peter Clothier as John's father. He and John's mother Mary were only married for about a day before he was arrested and committed to the asylum, and from Mary's account there didn't seem to have been time for them to consummate the marriage. However there is always the possibility that they didn't wait until they were married and she wouldn't actually have mentioned the consummation in a letter to her son anyway. So it's possible that John's suspicions are entirely unfounded and that his father is in fact his mother's husband, Peter Clothier. In that case John is wrong about Jeoffrey Escreet being his grandfather and the final sentence of the novel is false.
If JE is John's morfar, then he must be Mary's real father (which is possible because her supposed father John, had lived in JE's house since before he was married and Mary was brought up there). As JE was related to Mary's supposed father there could still have been a ressemblance between John Jr & John Sr, or it could have been that the people who made the remarks knew that JE was Mary's real father and were being catty, which would explain why Mary blushed.
On the other hand, if JE is John's farfar, then John's father could either be John Sr. (my first suspicion), or Martin Fortisquence. JE invited them to live with him when they finished university, and was very fond of them both. John Sr. returned his love but Martin never did, which could possibly be because he knew or at least suspected that JE was his father and resented him for this.
I think (but I could be wrong about this) that it said at some point that John Sr. and Martin looked like each other, which could only be explained if it was Martin who was JE's son, as otherwise he would not be related to John Sr. Oh bother - it's just occurred to me that maybe they are both JE's sons. Both their mothers would have known JE, so it is possible.
If Martin is John's father it would explain Jemima F's hostility to Mary, which seemed too extreme to be explained by being jealous of Mary's wealth when they were children. This is another possible explanation for her catty remarks about who John took after in looks. It would explain why Martin supported Mary financially and protected her and John from their enemies, but I'm surprised that he would have left his son nothing in his will, unless that was the price he paid to placate his wife. It also fits in with Mr Advowson's information about John's baptism.
The people who could have told John the truth are frankly unhelpful. John remembered that Mary had written "I could not bear to think that the father of my child had killed my Papa", but that is no help at all, since Jeoffrey Escreet, Peter Clothier & Martin Fortisquence were all in the house on the night of the murder.
Jemima told John "I never believed that the murderer was your father", which is too obscure by half, as I can't tell who she thinks the father was or who she thinks the murderer was, or even whether she knows the identity of either for certain or is just guessing. However, I can't understand why John does not press her about this, as she is very possibly the only person alive who may be able to answer his questions.
Tentative conclusions
I am leaning towards Jeoffrey Escreet being John's farfar and Martin Fortisquence being his father, but John misinterpreted so many clues throughout the book, that my secondary theory is that Peter Clothier is his father.
Sometime very soon I am going to have to read the whole book again and look out for more clues. In such a long book (the story ends on page 1191), it's really hard to flick through and find the bits I want to check again.
A loose end.
What happened to Lydia's baby? Did it die as she was told, or did I miss a clue and it was adopted like JE was a generation earlier? Oh, I just thought, in the afterword it says that there are clues to suggest that the Digweeds are also related to John, so maybe there's a link there, as I didn't pick up on that at all
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LibraryThing member adpaton
One of the most paradoxical books I have ever read, the Quincunx is a plot-driven page-turner, well-written and compulsively readable, yet dense and boring at times, more inexplicable than mysterious - more parody than pastiche.
Palliser was obviously influenced by Charles Dickens, taking his main
The hero is named [initially] Huffam, but that is the only semi-normal name in the book as the writer proceeds to deliver names of increasing lenth and unlikeliness - as he explains in the afterword, he has been collecting unusual names for decades, and Mompesson, Barbellion and Fortisquince are pretty commonplace compared to some of the more outlandish surnames he uses, such as Advowson, Maliphant and Palphramond.
Then there is the question of John Huffam's paternity - or John Mallamphy at he is called at this stage. I thought I was just stupid when, given the fraught wedding night enjoyed by Mary and Martin Huffam, I couldn't see any window of opportunity during which conception might have taken place. I reread the brief descriptions in the book and it still seemed unlikely. To my relief, the internet contains a vast body of work devoted to this very theme.
I have always wanted to discuss this book with a friend but although I have pressed it on many people, no one has ever taken to it - for which I cannot wholey blame them: fascinating, entranching , spell-binding, even awesome Quincunx may be, but it is not particuarly enjoyable.
Palliser was obviously influenced by Charles Dickens, taking his main
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inspiration from the books Bleak House - both deal with a chancery suit and inheritance - and David Copperfield - both feature weak and foolish mothers plus sojourns in the criminal undersworld - and Quincunx is seriously unsuitable to anyone who does not like their books long and wordy and perplexingly indirect. The hero is named [initially] Huffam, but that is the only semi-normal name in the book as the writer proceeds to deliver names of increasing lenth and unlikeliness - as he explains in the afterword, he has been collecting unusual names for decades, and Mompesson, Barbellion and Fortisquince are pretty commonplace compared to some of the more outlandish surnames he uses, such as Advowson, Maliphant and Palphramond.
Then there is the question of John Huffam's paternity - or John Mallamphy at he is called at this stage. I thought I was just stupid when, given the fraught wedding night enjoyed by Mary and Martin Huffam, I couldn't see any window of opportunity during which conception might have taken place. I reread the brief descriptions in the book and it still seemed unlikely. To my relief, the internet contains a vast body of work devoted to this very theme.
I have always wanted to discuss this book with a friend but although I have pressed it on many people, no one has ever taken to it - for which I cannot wholey blame them: fascinating, entranching , spell-binding, even awesome Quincunx may be, but it is not particuarly enjoyable.
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LibraryThing member randalrh
There's at least a star here for all the work that went into researching this. It's the kind of thing that's right in my wheelhouse--complex, self-consistent historical mystery. The kicker here is that it's self-consistent in it's inconsistency, something even harder to pull off.
LibraryThing member ablueidol
Bit of a sucker for a good victorian melodrama without the pages of desctiption that tend to put me off reading say Dickens. Love the fact that the author is as much achacter in the story morallsing and speculating as the players are.
LibraryThing member oddvark59
Simply the greatest novel written in the second half of the twentieth century. Complex plot, complex characters, and a great Dickensian romp through London and the English countryside.
LibraryThing member poulantik
a fantastic novel in the dickensian style about a struggle for nobility and with a precise and gruesom desciption of London in early 19th century.
LibraryThing member shawnd
Umberto Eco meets Charles Dicken, with a little Anthony Trollope and Ian Caldwell thrown in. Not many British Victorian novels written in 1989 +/- 20 years but here it is. Deep, complex, fairly fast paced but not as accelerated as they've become since it was written. I recommend this. Small type
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and 700+ pages. Show Less
LibraryThing member 30oddyearsofzan
The Quincunx is the first book I've read this year that I haven't been able to finish, although paradoxically I would still recommend it. Palliser's quasi-Victorian potboiler is meticuously researched and technically brilliant, but I found myself unable to warm to it, and its humourless, priggish
Nevertheless, this is absorbing and well worth a read - I may well attempt to complete it in the future.
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hero. I managed 931 of the 1200-odd pages, but when I realised I'd worked out the villain about a hundred pages previously - and he was my favourite character - I gave up.Nevertheless, this is absorbing and well worth a read - I may well attempt to complete it in the future.
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LibraryThing member atheist_goat
Very weird. Huge, sprawling, deliberately Dickensian but with a mean streak: the hero's mother, who is very clearly based on the character of David Copperfield's mother, gets herself in all kinds of trouble because she is stupid, and we're supposed to be infuriated at her stupidity as opposed to
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thinking it makes her more feminine, which would be the case in Dickens. The ending is especially strange. A digression into politics in the middle was so lethally boring I almost couldn't carry on, but other than that it was quite a page-turner even when I wasn't sure I liked it. Show Less
LibraryThing member riverwillow
I didn't think they wrote books like this any more. I will admit to having a great deal of affection for the nineteenth century novel and this novel ranks alongside those sweeping novels written by Dickens and Eliot in its complexity and density. Wonderful.
LibraryThing member sarbow
It starts off slow, but once the main cahracters get into london, the movie gets quite interesting and engaging.
LibraryThing member sableindian
This book is like a Charles Dickens novel. It starts off pretty slow. I found a review that I like: "John Huffam had a happy early childhood with his mother, but he always sensed a secret being hidden in the shadows of their lives. Eventually he learns that since his birth his mother has been
By Fran Laniado, Resident Schola
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hiding him from people who wish him harm. John is an potential heir to an extremely wealthy estate, a lost will and a codicil officially name John the heir, and he embarks on a quest to gain his hereditary rights. As he wanders penniless through England, enemies accost him at every turn. John learns that he cannot trust anyone, perhaps not even the beautiful, wealthy girl he has grown attached to. "By Fran Laniado, Resident Schola
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LibraryThing member rosinalippi
This novel is often compared to Dickens, and there is a strong sense of him in the careful descriptions and lightning quick characterizations. The story itself didn't do so much for me.
LibraryThing member bjbookman
Add a pinch of Trollope's 'Orley Farm' and some Dickens' "Bleak House" and a bit of Collins' 'Armadale" and a big helping of le Fanu's 'the Rose and the Key', you have this novel.
LibraryThing member JBD1
A twisted and suspenseful Dickensian-style monster of a book, intensely absorbing and affecting. Well worth every page.
LibraryThing member jonfaith
From the time of its release, my friends and I were all fascinated by Oliver Stone's film JFK. We'd watch it together and discuss such for hours, debating the motives and agency each suspect would have. This continued for many years and I'd wager if circumstances allowed such, we'd all still gather
I tip my hat to Kris and Aloha. I hectored them into reading this. I hope it wasn't painful.
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and view the film again. Most of us were never drawn to the literature surrounding the assassination, by which I mean the myriad accounts and theorists who created an additional universe of sinister possibility from that sunny afternoon in Dallas. By consensus our chief complaint was the too- tidy character of X, played with aplomb by Donald Sutherland. This walking Rosetta Stone meets Jim Garrison at Arlington National and proceeds to connect all the dots in Garrison's investigation. We'd groan with how connected it would thus appear. My problem with Quincunx was very similar. The primary characters would make impossibly stupid decisions, regroup and continue. This extends for 800 pages and about a dozen horrifying situations. Nearing collapse, the reader is more fortunate than John Huffam as a whole cadre of Donald Sutherlands step forward and reveal ALL the veiled areas of the multifaceted plot. I could deal with that. What was indigestible was the dearth of humor. There's hardly a crackle of hilarity in the entire tome. One would imagine this titular homage (John Huffam are Dickens' two middle names) to Dickens would contain some of the master's black mischief. This isn't the case.I tip my hat to Kris and Aloha. I hectored them into reading this. I hope it wasn't painful.
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LibraryThing member liz.mabry
This is the longest book I've read in a while, but it was fantastic. Read during a beach vacation and it kept my attention the entire time. Twisty and sneaky and lovely.
It's very Dickensian - which is usually not something I enjoy, but it's made me wonder whether I shouldn't give Great
It's very Dickensian - which is usually not something I enjoy, but it's made me wonder whether I shouldn't give Great
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Expectations, etc. a second change. Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
By most sane standards this is a ridiculous book. At least four times as long as the average modern novel, with a vast family-inheritance-saga plot that brings in just about every element of 19th century life that you remember from Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, Thackeray, Trollope, the
Not quite everything: the chapter in which Our Hero finds himself forced to work in a hellish Lancashire cotton mill seems to have been inadvertently missed out, and there's a mysterious absence of any serious discussion of religion. But we get shady lawyers, complex financial transactions, missing documents, elopements, murders, street crime, poverty, prostitution, burglary, body-snatching, "schools" and "lunatic asylums" that are nothing more than places to imprison inconvenient family-members, domestic service, enclosures, workhouses, stage-coaches, a public hanging, a tour of the London sewers, and much, much more.
There's even some entertaining nineteenth-century spelling to keep us amused, with (too) much play being made with sopha, lanthorn, visiter, shore (for sewer), and the like. And a few chapters in the central section are from the diary of a female narrator who can't spell at all...
So it's hardly surprising if, as Palliser complains in his 1992 afterword, this is a book that most readers just treat as a clever pastiche of the Victorian novel and some took as a satire on Mrs Thatcher's "Victorian values". (The action of the book takes place in the 1820s, so it's not really "Victorian" at all, but many of Dickens's and Collins's novels were set in the same pre-railway period.)
Palliser is simply too much the academic literary scholar, keen to use his expertise to tell us as much as he possibly can about the type of things that would have been going on in the minds of his nineteenth-century characters, and it all rather swamps his grand literary design for the book. We're more or less forced to notice that there's something going on with fivefold patterns (five parts, each divided into five books, each containing five chapters), and we're never quite as convinced as the narrator is that we've been given a complete solution to the mysteries of the plot, but there's just so much detail for us to keep track of that there's very little incentive to do what Palliser is apparently expecting the reader to do and work out alternative ways of making sense of the inter-relationships between the characters, different from the family-trees he helpfully scatters in our path.
The ending is a kind of clumsy compromise between our need for some sort of neat closure that would allow the narrator to stop work and the author's need to show that this is a book written in the late 20th century when no-one believes that literature has a place for fully-determined stories any more, but I doubt if many readers will follow the example of the apocryphal friend of the author who was so thrown off by the ambiguity in the last sentence that he went back to the beginning and started again. Life's too short!
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Brontës, and many other English 19th-century writers (there's even a little echo of The prisoner of Zenda at one point...). Not quite everything: the chapter in which Our Hero finds himself forced to work in a hellish Lancashire cotton mill seems to have been inadvertently missed out, and there's a mysterious absence of any serious discussion of religion. But we get shady lawyers, complex financial transactions, missing documents, elopements, murders, street crime, poverty, prostitution, burglary, body-snatching, "schools" and "lunatic asylums" that are nothing more than places to imprison inconvenient family-members, domestic service, enclosures, workhouses, stage-coaches, a public hanging, a tour of the London sewers, and much, much more.
There's even some entertaining nineteenth-century spelling to keep us amused, with (too) much play being made with sopha, lanthorn, visiter, shore (for sewer), and the like. And a few chapters in the central section are from the diary of a female narrator who can't spell at all...
So it's hardly surprising if, as Palliser complains in his 1992 afterword, this is a book that most readers just treat as a clever pastiche of the Victorian novel and some took as a satire on Mrs Thatcher's "Victorian values". (The action of the book takes place in the 1820s, so it's not really "Victorian" at all, but many of Dickens's and Collins's novels were set in the same pre-railway period.)
Palliser is simply too much the academic literary scholar, keen to use his expertise to tell us as much as he possibly can about the type of things that would have been going on in the minds of his nineteenth-century characters, and it all rather swamps his grand literary design for the book. We're more or less forced to notice that there's something going on with fivefold patterns (five parts, each divided into five books, each containing five chapters), and we're never quite as convinced as the narrator is that we've been given a complete solution to the mysteries of the plot, but there's just so much detail for us to keep track of that there's very little incentive to do what Palliser is apparently expecting the reader to do and work out alternative ways of making sense of the inter-relationships between the characters, different from the family-trees he helpfully scatters in our path.
The ending is a kind of clumsy compromise between our need for some sort of neat closure that would allow the narrator to stop work and the author's need to show that this is a book written in the late 20th century when no-one believes that literature has a place for fully-determined stories any more, but I doubt if many readers will follow the example of the apocryphal friend of the author who was so thrown off by the ambiguity in the last sentence that he went back to the beginning and started again. Life's too short!
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Subjects
Awards
This Mystery is Amazing! (#5 — 1999)
Language
Original publication date
1989
Physical description
800 p.; 9.22 inches
ISBN
0345371135 / 9780345371133