A Triumph of Trying-Really-Hard

By R.Z. Sheppard

INCLINE OUR HEARTS

by A.N. Wilson;

Viking; 250 pages; $17.95

Of all Britain's young literary lions, Andrew Norman Wilson, 38, has been busiest at marking his territory. Since the mid-1970s he has published eleven satiric novels, plus biographies of John Milton, Sir Walter Scott, Hilaire Belloc, and last year's much and justly praised Tolstoy. In addition, Wilson has written about Christian theology and religious affairs (How Can We Know?; The Church in Crisis).

Add to this diverse plenty a consistently high quality of thought and prose, and one has the makings of a Man of Letters -- a quaint designation in this era of celebrity scribes, but valid nevertheless. Wilson's formal structure and traditional style indicate an impatience with the sort of contemporary fiction that makes its own creation a central concern. What matters to him is the contradictions of human nature and the religious impulses that seek to understand the desires of the flesh and the spirit.

These are assuredly old and durable subjects, yet ones that Wilson probes with a comic irony sharpened on the modern world. Inevitably, his work has been compared to the novels of Evelyn Waugh. There are similarities but only "up to a point," as a subordinate in Waugh's Scoop responded when Lord Copper blustered that Yokohama is the capital of Japan. Wilson's comedy is more tolerant than that of the malicious master. Both authors, however, project intimidating confidence in their styles and possess a technical virtuosity that makes the difficult look easy.

Not surprisingly, these qualities can be found in the character of Julian Ramsay, narrator and groping intelligence of Incline Our Hearts. Born in London with the coming of World War II, he is orphaned by German bombs and sent to Norfolk to be raised by his Aunt Deirdre and Uncle Roy, a local vicar. Rounding out the rectory household is Felicity, a laconic and inaptly named teenage cousin, who leaves her room long enough to be impregnated and abandoned by Raphael Hunter, scholar-scoundrel and the novel's sinister presence.

These are the central players in what evolves from a surface entertainment into a deceptively rich and complex novel about coming of age (if not about the age itself). Julian's story brims with figures and rituals familiar to British fiction: barmy relatives, eccentric aristocrats, a public school -- the "English Gulag" -- where the headmaster enjoys hitting boys with sticks. As a teenager, Julian spends a summer in Brittany, where French is taught by Mme. de Normandin and sex by her daughter Barbara. Later, while trying to avoid work in the army, he learns another of life's essential lessons: "Not-really-trying is just as much effort as trying-really-hard. The only difference between the two modes of activity is that not-really-trying receives no reward."

It is one of Wilson's deeper ironies that the callow but decent Julian lacks conviction while the older and more experienced Hunter is full of indecent passion and ambition. Hunter's conquest of Felicity is pure business, part of securing the private papers of James Petworth Lampitt, a deceased minor writer who was a friend of her father's. Hunter succeeds, and by playing up Lampitt's possible suicide and probable homosexuality, turns the life of a justifiably forgotten literary figure into a scandalous best seller. "One accomplishes nothing so stylishly as the thing in which one has no belief," thinks Julian. "Gigolos probably make better lovers than those weak with desire; the best politicians are those who are most like actors; the most influential churchmen are those who seem furthest from the ideals of the Gospel."

Elsewhere, this demoralizing line of reasoning leads to more profound conclusions. Unlike most autobiographers, Julian concedes that what he remembers is only a crude map of his former self. "Our attempts to recover or uncover the past and what really happened are doomed at the outset to failure because it is we ourselves who are doing the investigation," he admits. "We move on. We become someone else."

At novel's end, Julian, harboring ambitions to become an actor, is in church listening to Uncle Roy intone the Ten Commandments and thinking that the one prohibiting adultery will be hard to keep. This, and his remark about politicians resembling actors, suggest that Julian may grow up to be a successful public man who gets entangled in a sex scandal. Given Wilson's production rate, it is unlikely that readers will have to wait long to find out. Incline Our Hearts is the first novel of a proposed trilogy. If the next two are as good as the first, readers will have a small classic on their hands.