Le Quinconce

Charles Palliser


Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars
4.00 · 30 ratings · 802 pages · Published: 25 Mar 1989

Le Quinconce by Charles Palliser
The protagonist, a young man naive enough to be blind to all clues about his own hidden history (and to the fact that his very existence is troubling to all manner of evildoers) narrates a story of uncommon beauty which not only brings readers face-to-face with dozens of piquantly drawn characters at all levels of 19th-century English society but re-creates with precision the tempestuous weather and gnarly landscape that has been a motif of the English novel since Wuthering Heights. The suspension of disbelief happens easily, as the reader is led through twisted family trees and plot lines.

The quincunx of the title is a heraldic figure of five parts that appears at crucial points within the text (the number five recurs throughout the novel, which itself is divided into five parts, one for each of the family galaxies whose orbits the narrator is pulled into). Quintuple the length of the ordinary novel, this extraordinary tour de force also has five times the ordinary allotment of adventure, action and aplomb.

Tagged as:

    romance tags

    crime tags

    literary-fiction tags

    historical-fiction tags

    fantasy tags

    sci-fi tags

    action-adventure tags

    thriller tags

    horror tags

    Collections/Custom tags



    Reviews