Our Last Taboo
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing OUR TABOO By Brooke Allen A. N. Wilson will never be a first-rate novelist, but in the course of his extraordinarily prolific career—not yet 50, he is the author of 17 novels...
...He has spent his professional life pondering the contemporary confusion and the relation between private ethics and public morality: "the basic ethical question of how we distinguish between right and wrong, and the somewhat different question of how society decides what is right and wrong...
...Everyone in the household is too busy to bother with Bobs, except Oliver, and it never occurs to her mother or grandmother to wonder why this middle-aged man, this Great Thinker, might wish to spend so much of his time with a child not his own...
...In some respects, [Oliver] appeared to be defending 'the System,' to be saying that unless we all, as a society, agreed on a firm set of rules, we should break up...
...At the same time, he betrayed a consciousness of why this simple picture could not hold, not because there were so many more wicked people in the world than there used to be, but because we had all become isolated individuals, isolated not merely from one another, but metaphysically alone...
...her lover, Michal, a divorced mother and busy social worker...
...If Oliver needed to satisfy "that side of life," why could he not have turned to one of them, his soulmates...
...Lotte, a half-witted au pair from Austria...
...He handles the novel's long portions of exposition clumsily, for example, and while two of his principal characters are American (the second one is Camilla's mother), he shows a very imperfect command of idiomatic American English...
...Had there not, even when he was still at the college, been 'forays' to London...
...So much for logic, it would seem, and this is certainly one of Wilson's points...
...The answer is still at best moot, as we are compelled to acknowledge each time we open a newspaper or turn on the television news...
...Michal is upset more than anything by the loss of Oliver as the perfect babysitter...
...Oliver is worshiped by all the women...
...For instance, he believes "It was the very fact that, unlike him she was too young to weep about [his marriage and future separation from herself] in solitude that made her the stronger of the partnership...
...We are accorded a final vision of the characters' lives, some 15 years after the main action of the novel...
...In his recent biographies of Jesus and St...
...Some years later, however, he lost his faith in a very public, Victorian fashion, going to the extent of publishing a contentious pamphlet, "Against Religion...
...And when at the age of 40 or so he decides to leave the protected purlieus of his university and live in London, he finds, like all men of charisma and promise, no shortage of doting women eager to take care of him...
...There are Catharine (always called Cuffe...
...Wherever our intellect might lead us, and no matter how superior it might be, some things are just plain wrong...
...His logic, or so he believes, is unassailable...
...Indeed, "Michal sometimes thought she did not need to send Bobs to school, since friendship with Oliver was the best possible education which any parent could hope for...
...Oliver, it turns out, has been playing sexual games with little Bobs ever since she was four years old...
...Only Bobs, oddly enough, seems to accept Oliver's impending departure with equanimity...
...The novel's central character is a philosopher, Oliver Gold...
...and Michal's charming little daughter, Bobs...
...But whether the present breakdown is due to the erosion of traditional modes of observance, or to changes wrought by such developments as the sexual revolution or the women's movement, the sad truth is that as a society we no longer have a consensus on what is or is not acceptable...
...If we look for comparable writers we find them not among his contemporaries but among the Victorian condition-of-England novelists like Disraeli or Charles Kingsley...
...She loves only her dog...
...An intellectual who is not artistically instinctive, he works within a rather old-fashioned genre: the novel of ideas...
...To Oliver, Bobs is simply the pliant child-lover of his dreams...
...Wilson's special interest has always been religion, or, more recently, the lack of it...
...Paul he has composed rationalistic treatises on subjects that have for centuries defied rationalism...
...But the author's primary focus is direct and uncompromising...
...Laughter had become almost her only way of expressing emotion...
...Oliver has become simply grotesque, but in the 27-year-old Bobs we see the final, devastating effects of her early seduction...
...How, then, can we justify the maintenance of the last taboo, concerning the sexual feeling of children...
...The objects of his lust are not men, but little girls...
...Yet with his superior powers of reason he has thoroughly persuaded himself that to act upon his preference is not morally wrong...
...She is his "dream child," the love object he had never expected actually to possess...
...Oliver, playing devil's advocate on a radio show, asks rhetorically...
...Under the surface of a flippant comedy of manners, Wilson presents a harrowing picture of a child's ruin, and a serious indictment of parental irresponsibility and the abdication of moral duties...
...Janet, in a cruelly funny scene, bares her withered breasts to him in a misconceived seduction attempt...
...The only way out he can find is to marry, and for this purpose he chooses the most unthreatening woman he knows— mousy, childlike Camilla Baynes, an American girl working at a London auction house...
...He provides a focus for their lives, a touch of celebrity, a connection with the great world of Mind and Spirit...
...She had guessed so, but never considered for a moment that they could interrupt his intellectual union with herself...
...He has hardly given her an option, and in any case he has always been there for her, the one person, it seems, who takes an interest in her...
...This should hardly come as a surprise...
...Cuffe offers herself in marriage...
...And the truth is that she does love him...
...Mentally gifted and emotionally idiotic, he sees their union as one of the great love stories of history: They are Dante and Beatrice, or, a bit more realistically, John Ruskin and Rose La Touche...
...It has been commonplace in the 20th century to say that the decline of religion has left a vacuum...
...It is a mistake to think of "science" as a monolithic and arbitrary theory similar to Christianity, when it is, in fact, a method of gathering information about the manifold wonders of the natural world...
...Science has for some time been put forward as a replacement, but has proved unequal to the challenge...
...it is not a happy ending for any of them...
...Why should what we call 'pedophilia' be regarded as the ultimate wickedness...
...The book is also a judgment on the sort of moral relativism fashionable today, personified here by Oliver Gold himself...
...Suppose a child and an adult wanted it...
...In his new novel, Dream Children (Norton, 218 pp., $23.95), A. N. Wilson has made this disarray the background to his story...
...Michal's widowed mother Janet, the doyenne of the establishment, a pathetic character who looks back wistfully on her glory days as the wife of a second-rate, social-climbing literary critic...
...As a young man he trained for ordination as an Anglican minister, and although he eventually left the seminary he remained a practicing Christian...
...What with her work and her sex life, she has never had much time for Bobs and has been only too happy to let Oliver take over her care...
...Oliver's secret, however, is darker than mere homosexuality...
...Taking on themes that have proved troubling to contemporary society, he creates a cast of characters to dramatize them...
...Wilson's writing tends to be rather slipshod...
...In the event, Oliver and Camilla's engagement comes disastrously to a close, and there is an unexpected reshuffling of partnerships and alliances...
...In his mind, though, and in the minds of his acolytes and groupies, he is more than simply intelligent, he is a genius—almost certainly the next John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell...
...It has sometimes occurred to his housemates to wonder why Oliver never appears to have a special friend of either sex, but they all prefer not to think of anything so disturbing...
...She wishes to assume "that he was either a celibate, or one who chose to satisfy 'that side of life' with those of his own sex...
...But far from demonstrating great inner strength, Bobs' mysterious self-possession is a symptom of her growing inability to know her own feelings...
...But now Bobs is 10, and Oliver is not keen to watch her grow up...
...Cuffe's attitude is a pragmatic one...
...Frozen in her childhood love, unable to have an ordinary sexual relationship, she spends her time working and caring for the mother who never cared for her...
...Undeniably, one of religion's functions was to provide mankind with consensual codes of behavior...
...His reflections about himself and Bobs are mind bogglingly solipsistic...
...At the behest of a former student, Catharine Cuffe, now a professor in her own right, he comes to live at 12 Wagner Rise as the only man in a dauntingly female household...
...Writers & Writing OUR TABOO By Brooke Allen A. N. Wilson will never be a first-rate novelist, but in the course of his extraordinarily prolific career—not yet 50, he is the author of 17 novels and several hefty biographies—he has carved out a very useful literary niche for himself...
...Can a secular culture achieve this, even to the unsatisfactory degree that religion did...
...Oliver is clearly intelligent...
...He is aware that his tastes are not "normal," and that they probably have their source in his seduction, at the age of nine, by a stepmother...
...The Wagner Rise harem is appalled by this turn of events...
...In many societies, it had been deemed perfectly 'normal.'" Future generations, he is convinced, will be as shocked at the persecution of people like himself as we now are at Oscar Wilde's...
...There are women in oriental cultures to whom is entrusted the nurture of the next enlightened one or avatar before his public emergence as a savior," writes Wilson...
...Dream Children is outstanding as an attack on contemporary moral doublethink, and on a very familiar type of intellectual narcissism...
...Oliver Gold's presence at Wagner Rise gives each member of the household, in her own way, a similar sense of vocation...
Vol. 81 • September 1998 • No. 10
