He needs a companion for the races, and Oscar's fate is sealed by the error. Later, as an odd, solitary student at Oxford, he is accidentally chosen as a gambling companion by the roguish Wardley-Fish, who knocks on his door mistaking it for the college room of another undergraduate. Every day the boy throws lots under "the terrible pressure of eternity". By a private process of divination, casting a stone on to a lettered grid, he perceives that his father's faith is false, and that he should desert him for the household of the local Anglican vicar. Oscar, brought up in mid-19th-century Devon by his loving but utterly inflexible father, a leading member of a fundamentalist Christian sect, believes that happenstance is in fact providence. Partly this is by having leading characters who are themselves fascinated by chance. Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda is a beautifully managed narrative, but one that respects accident. H ow can a novel be true to chance? Novels aspire to be level with life, but the sense of pattern that all good narrative provides can seem unlifelike.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |