Here is the unreliable narrator, Thomas Bunting, telling us that he is an unreliable narrator. Does that mean that he will drift into the truth or “win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence”? His account of Augustine is defective and a Bunting truth. Evil is privative and a lie is privative inasmuch as it deprives the world of a feature that is inconvenient for the utterer. The bunts of Bunting are generally sportive fabrications, fabulisms of an idle drifting mind or it maybe, as we read deeper into inadvertent truth, symptoms of incipient madness.
In any case his wife Jane has given him the red card and sent him off the marital pitch, not to take an early bath for he doesn’t do baths or ablutions of any kind preferring to loll unshaven in a filthy dressing gown of a morning and onwards into a day of divagation from his doctoral thesis into a ragbag of theodicy - The Book against God.
"At the moment I’m living in an unpleasant little room, a bedsit I suppose, in Swiss Cottage, in a 1930s building on the Finchley Road pounded by traffic. I moved here in May, just after my father’s funeral, and after my estranged wife put me “on probation.” At the service, with Father’s body barely cold, Jane told me that she would have me back only if I could prove to her that I was no longer a liar, an operation which, I see now, has more than a touch about it of the famous Cretan paradox. In four months nothing has happened yet on that front, so here I am on the Finchley Road, alone.”
In the manic phase he lives beyond his card’s means and won’t open the dunning letters until the baliffs are threatened. He claims that due to his parents’ lack of means he is lead into sybarite temptation. Daddy is the vicar of a country parish outside Durham, a scholar who left the university theological faculty.
"But my parents’ finances were sickly; in my memory, Father seems to be continually driving in to Durham to meet “the bank manager,” to arrange for “another lease of life.” Though my parents weren’t ascetic, indeed quite worldly by instinct, our life was materially thin. All our textures were strained through the sieve of their finances.”
Wood is a fine writer steeped in English literature and Dickens spreads his wings over the descriptions of his fathers dwindling congregation.
"With gentle, undogmatic faith, he fit himself around the lives of his flock. Peter believed that most of his petitioners were in search of friendship rather than God. Mr. Tattersall, now long dead, used to come every week on Sunday afternoon when I was a boy. He had a red birthmark like a wax letterseal across one cheek, and always carried a small umbrella, even when it was sunny. Father told me that Mr. Tattersall was “terribly alone.” Mother told me that Mr. Tattersall had driven a bus for many years, the cream-coloured 54 that went every day between the villages. He had had an accident in which he knocked down a pedestrian. There had been nobody on the bus at the time—there rarely was—and Mr. Tattersall had accelerated away. The pedestrian recovered, and Mr. Tattersall, whom no one liked, was not charged; perhaps it was felt that he was already punished by the now shameful symbolism of his birthmark.”
Is Thomas Bunting’s theodicy an attempt to kill the god of his father or relief from seven years labour on a thesis on the Epicureans. He’s nearly finished and the question ‘and then what’ may be the burden that he can no longer bear or put down. It’s not unknown in the academic world -
The portrait of Tommy’s wife Jane is tender, close and accurate:
“Her hair is very dark, fiercely commanded into a ponytail which hangs quiveringly, like the needle of a delicate instrument designed to monitor her moods. I got to know this shaking sleek ponytail very well indeed, because Jane has many moods, and there is no way to predict when or why she will laugh (at which point her ponytail, laughter’s tassel, swings and rocks) or become angry (the ponytail, now pride’s brush, stiff and unmoving, as she tilts her head to the left and closes her eyes in fury). Her noise is quite long—something suggestive of erotic prolongation in a long nose, I think—and her neck is long, too. At its base is a teaspoon declivity. There are freckles on her collarbones: eager touchmarks, sexual dapple. Her accent is very proper.”
What is the fealty of a liar worth? Not much Jane thinks as he ducks and dives around her wish to have a child. Then his father dies before God does and his eulogy at the service is a self-absorbed argument with the departed. It’s about as far as an Englishman can take a Dostoevskian skandaly.
This is a book well worth reading and it must have been deeply frustrating for the critics who wanted to ply the birch. I’m sure some found a way.
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