Titmuss Regained:
Jr, Robert E Hosmer
TOO LONG, TOO SAD, TOO BITTER TITNDSS REGAINED John Mortimer Viking Penguin, $19.95, 281 pp. Robert E. Hosmer, Jr. Here we are, returned to the village of Rapstone in the Thames Valley, the...
...From a cast that includes many more players, Lady Grace Fanner emerges a star...
...Titmuss and wife move into Rapstone Manor and Leslie feels a sense of full accomplishment for the first time in his life...
...Simeon Simcox, a liberal Anglican rector comfortably fixed with an income from a family brewery and given to joining every protest going, was a cynical but affectionate send-up of the marching leftie brigades, a literate social comedy at once amusing and terribly serious...
...and some wonderful satiric swipes...
...Kevin Bulstrode to the bedside of the ailing Lady Grace, is a stunning set-piece, and there are others, though they are somewhat attenuated and imperfectly rendered...
...But to read this novel is to be reminded of his betters- Dickens, Waugh, Spark...
...That earlier novel with its focal character of the Rev...
...Dot Curdle, owner of a "rabbit hacienda" threatened by developers who want to turn her property into a parking lot...
...And therein lie the strengths of what is at best a rather mediocre, familiar fiction: acast of eccentrics...
...not for him the innovations of those modernists Joyce and Woolf...
...and indeed, after Mortimer creates her as "a pretty good advertisement for a diet of gossip, champagne, and cigarettes," he cannot resist crafting a comic scene which displays his finest talents: a sharp eye for human foibles...
...Here we are, returned to the village of Rapstone in the Thames Valley, the locale of Paradise Postponed (1985), John Mortimer's acclaimed roman a clef about post-World War II England...
...Chapter 2, which is entirely given over to the visit of the Rev...
...a keen ear for dialogue and precise comic timing...
...a cloud of negativity blankets all and the restorative function of satire is forgotten...
...Mortimer renders the disparate worlds of politics, Oxford garden parties, seamy-side London, and village life with convincing detail, while he works his way to a predictable conclusion with some interesting twists achieved by clever characterization and scenic design...
...How Titmuss deals with both threats is the stuff of plot for Titmuss Regained...
...Our previous visit was a much more satisfying excursion...
...anum-ber of vividly realized scenes...
...And certainly Mortimer's rapier is finely honed for swiping at everyone and everything in Titmuss Regained, not just Leslie the upwardly mobile Thatcherite, but Anglican rectors and their "modern" theology, land developers, newly-titled entrepreneurs of questionable honor and values, American student protesters, fervid environmentalists, ludicrous diet faddists, and scheming lawyers...
...Mortimer's cast of "characters" comprise an amusing panorama, all the way from Leslie himself to Dr...
...and a professional sense of stage movement...
...Fred Simcox, a rather bumbling general practitioner and jazz musician...
...Hector Bolitho Jones, warden of the Rapstone Valley Nature Area, and his wife Daphne Bridgewater who leaves him for Barry Harvester, a local herbalist and "Trotskyite shopping-precinct huckster who sold nettle tea as a cure for arthritis...
...John Mortimer deliberately writes a traditional Victorian novel...
...In the end, nothing escapes...
...The gifts these novelists share-a keen ear for dialogue, a razor-edged delight in the puncturing phrase, a sharp eye for damning mannerism and foible, a compassion for the vagaries of the human heart and spirit-are matched by Mortimer...
...Now Conservative MP and secretary of state in the government, responsible for the Department of Housing, Ecological Affairs, and Planning (H.E...
...Like that "promise of a hot summer, never to be fulfilled," Titmuss Regained does not fulfill the promise of Paradise Postponed...
...and the lowering shadow of a proposal to "develop" the valley into a suburban mall...
...But two clouds darken the horizon: the looming shade of Jenny's late husband, Tony...
...Leslie Titmuss has but two more goals: the office of prime minister (denied him by the longevity of the incumbent) and a second wife (accomplished by his marriage to the vivacious and cultured Jenny Sidonia...
...In Titmuss Regained, Mortimer has taken a subplot from Paradise Postponed, the story of Leslie Titmuss, conniving and shrewd son of a brewery accountant, and made it the major plot...
...An inevitable sadness and oppressive pessimism cloak this fiction...
...But in contrast to him, their narrative gifts are more than sufficient to tell a full story, and sometimes in far fewer pages.far fewer pages...
...Furthermore, Titmuss Regained is just too long and discursive, with digressions, excessive descriptive detail (particularly concerning landscape), prolix dialogue, and a surplus of "characters" who reinforce types, much in the fashion of Tudor drama, rather than becoming full-fledged individuals in their own right...
Vol. 117 • August 1990 • No. 14
