To the Hermitage
by Malcolm Bradbury
The Overlook Press, 498 pages, $27.95
Malcolm Bradbury's last novel (he died in November) is a thoroughly encyclopedic undertaking. Not only does it show signs of extensive scholarship but its style proves more befitting a reference book than a work of fiction, filling in the blanks rather than creating suggestive voids. Here Bradbury wrote by a process of literary accumulation, using words like bricks and mortar to build a solid fortress of informational prose inhabited by historical characters (Voltaire, Potemkin, Catherine the Great) along with familiar modern types (a temperamental diva, a wisecracking American professor). Given his subject—the efforts of a group of contemporary scholars and artists to create a new version of Diderot's all-encompassing Encyclopedia—Bradbury's fictional cataloguing is perhaps to be expected. But this does not make it any less ponderous. The author was England's most famous creative-writing teacher (his students included Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan), and in this novel he was in a pedantic mood, jovially lecturing the reader on such topics as Enlightenment philosophy, Russian history, and Swedish social democracy. The book's chapters alternate between a rendering of Diderot's tutorial mission to the court of Catherine the Great and the imaginary Diderot Project, a 1993 re-creation of that expedition led by a Swedish professor.
The historical chapters prove the more engrossing, delivering a satirical take on the Age of Enlightenment which suggests that vanity, realpolitik, and erotic impulse had a lot more to do with its great achievements than any unfettered flowering of human reason. Cameo appearances by Voltaire and Catherine are especially sharp, the former cast as a preening careerist, the latter as an overworked chief executive trying to keep the lid on a fractious nation. Diderot, meanwhile, is an amiably shambolic character who never realizes that his attempt to provide an exhaustive account of the human intellect is doomed from the outset. Less successful are the contemporary chapters, told in the voice of a British novelist who, like Diderot, always seems to be one step behind the action. Although Bradbury's jabs at contemporary academia are occasionally funny, they are hardly groundbreaking. And his view of post-Communist Russia is cursory—it is no accident that the characters spend more time on their Baltic ferry than in the streets of St. Petersburg. It is difficult to know exactly what Bradbury is getting at in these chapters. Is it that modern scholars are more concerned with their own reputations than with their subject matter? Or perhaps that we are no more enlightened than our predecessors? Whatever the answer, it hardly seems worth all the scaffolding and heavy lifting needed to create those sturdy pillars of prose.
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