The Rebel Angels

Parlabane laughed. "Of course you can't appreciate the sweep of it, because you haven't seen it all," he said. "The plan is there, but it reveals itself slowly. This isn't a romance for holiday reading, you know. It's a really great book, and I expect that when it has made its first mark, people will read and reread, and discover new depths every time. As they do with Joyce – though it's my ideas that are complex, not my language. You are deceived by its first impression, which is that of a life-story – the intellectual pilgrimage of an uncommon and very rich mind, linked with a questing spirit. I can say this to you because you're an old friend, and up to a point you comprehend my quality. Other readers will comprehend other things, and some will comprehend more. It's a book in which really devoted and understanding readers will find themselves, and thus will find something of the essence of our times. The world is drawing near to the end of one of the Platonic Aeons – the Aeon of Pisces – and gigantic changes are in the air. This book is probably the first of the great books of the New Aeon, the Aeon of Aquarius, and it foreshadows what lies in the future for mankind."

"Aha. Yes, I see. Or rather, I haven't seen. Frankly, it seemed to me to be about you and everybody you've locked horns with since your childhood."

"Well, Sim, you know I don't mean to be nasty, but I'm afraid that is a criticism of you, rather than of my book. You're a man who uses a mirror to see if his tie is straight, not to look into his own eyes. You're no worse than thousands of others will be, when first they read it. But you're a nice old thing, so I'll give you a few clues. Perhaps another drink, just to start me off. I wish you wouldn't measure drinks with that little dinkus. I'll pour my own."

Helping himself to what was really a tumbler of Scotch, with a little water on top for the sake of appearances, he launched into a description of his book, most of which I had heard before and all of which I was to hear several times again.

"It's extremely dense in texture, you see. A multiplicity of themes, interwoven and illuminating each other, and written so that every sentence contains a complex nexus of possible meanings, giving rise to a variety of possible interpretations. Meaning is packed within meaning, so that the whole thing unfolds like the many skins of an onion. The book moves forward in the ordinary literal or historical sense, but its real movement is dialectical and moral, and the conclusion is reached by the pressure of successive renunciations, discoveries of error, and what the careful reader discerns to be partial truths."

"Tough stuff."

"Not really. The simple reader can be quite happy with a literal interpretation. It will seem to be the biography of a rather foolish and peculiarly perverse young man, born to live in the Spirit, but determined to escape that fate or postpone it as long as possible because he wants to explore the ways of the world and its creatures. It will be quite realistic, you see, so that it may even appear to be a simple narrative. A fool could find it idle or even tedious, but he'll press on because of the spicy parts.

"That's the literal aspect. But of course there is the allegorical aspect. The life of the principal character, a young academic, is the journey of a modern Everyman, on a Pilgrim's Progress. The reader follows the movement of his soul from its infantile fantasies, through its adolescent preoccupation with the mechanical and physical aspects of experience, until he discovers logical principles, metaphysics, and particularly scepticism, until he is landed in the dilemmas of middle age – early middle age – and maturity, and finally to his recovery, through imagination, of a unified view of life, of a synthesis of unconscious fantasy, scientific knowledge, moral mythology, and wisdom that meets in a religious reconciliation of the soul with reality through the acceptance of revealed truth."

"Whew!"

"Hold on a minute. That isn't all. There's the moral dimension of the book. It's a treatise on folly, error, frustration, and exploration of the blind alleys and false theories about life as currently propagated and ineffectually practised. The hero – a not-too-bright adventurer – is looking for the good life in which intellect is at harmony with emotion, intelligence integrated through recollected experience, sentiment tempered by fact, desire directed towards worldly objects and controlled by a sense of humour and proportion."

"I'm glad to hear there is going to be some humour in it."

"Oh, it's all humour from start to finish. The deep, rumbling humour of the fulfilled spirit is at the heart of the book. Like Joyce, but not so confined by the old Jesuit boundaries."

"That'll be nice."