The inheritor

A late Benson novel which may disappoint anyone in search of the bizarreries of Mapp, Lucia and his other comic triumphs. It may also disappoint some of us who rate Benson as a writer to be reckoned with. Set in collegiate Cambridge and later in Cornwall, the protagonists are a young don, Maurice Crofts and an impossibly 'beautiful' undergraduate called Steven Gervase. Steven is in search of some intangible, primaeval emotional and spiritual reality or truthfulness and sees in Maurice a fellow-traveller. Much of the novel is taken up chronicling Maurice's obsession with Steven, his subsequent realisation that the unconditional nonconformity of his beloved involves an inhuman degree of selfishness and absence of basic fellow feeling and Steven's inability to turn away from the lure of the wild satyric rites he enjoys in the woods of his Cornish estates and become the father and gentleman that the world expects him to be. Crucial to the plot and possibly destructive to the credibility of the novel on a narrative level is the detail that the Gervases are subject to a devastating curse(that's a real curse, folks) which involves the first-born son of each generation being blighted by appalling physical and mental abnormality. Steven's much-vaunted 'beauty' gives the world hope that the malediction has run its course but it has simply gone to ground and manifests itself in him in the sociopathic emotional sterilty he shows to everyone. The suggestion that all of this in someway metaphoric seems unnecessary. The homerotic is never anywhere other than on the surface---even Steven's hapless wife Betty is described as looking like a boy--- and so there is no particular effort required to discern that Benson's chief concern is homosexuality and its consequences. The novel might work successfully, if unpleasantly, on the premise of discussing the thesis that, while the attraction of homosexual emotions are understandable and even pleasurable when they are aroused by-- and expressed in --someone as extraordinary as Steven Gervase,any attempt to act upon them is repellent, dangerous and destructive. Benson had previously expressed his (at least official) revulsion at same-gender sex in David Blaize, Michael and a range of other non-comic novels but The Inheritor displays a fascination with the abyss which is, in itself, off-putting, to say the least. That the theme has him so resolutely in its grip is suggested by the fact that his usual gifts seem to have abandoned him

שנה

1993

שפה

English

הוצאה

Millivres Books

מהדורות

1

עמודים

316

ISBN

9781873741061

מקור הנתונים: Wikidata