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{"id":6308,"date":"2012-09-26T01:02:20","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T05:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=6308"},"modified":"2012-09-26T12:13:50","modified_gmt":"2012-09-26T16:13:50","slug":"how-green-was-my-carnation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2012\/09\/how-green-was-my-carnation.html","title":{"rendered":"How Green Was My Carnation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The God of Mirrors<\/em>, by Robert Reilly, is a soapy little novel about Oscar Wilde. It basically goes through the historical record imagining what each triumph or disaster might have felt like. There are lots of Wilde epigrams and assorted flotsam throughout the book, not always placed in a way which makes sense (there\u2019s an allusion to the Marquess of Queensberry looking like a misshapen dwarf at the court of the Spanish infanta, which is\u2026 an unusual choice given that the dwarf is the hero of \u201cThe Birthday of the Infanta,\u201d and the weirdness of the choice doesn\u2019t seem deliberate).<\/p>\n

The overwhelming impression is that this is a novel about a large pack of alcoholic egotists, in which the least-egotistical one (Robbie Ross doesn\u2019t count) is destroyed by the least-alcoholic one. Lord Alfred Douglas seems to stay creepily sober no matter how much he drinks. Somewhere he must keep a Breathalyzer of Dorian Gray.<\/p>\n

On two subjects dear to my heart the novel is mixed. Its treatment of the Church is even less satisfying than in the recent movie Wilde<\/em>: Catholicism comes up toward the beginning, to create atmosphere, and then gets forgotten for a very long time. <\/a>The God of Mirrors<\/em> brings it back at the end but doesn\u2019t seem to know what to do with it. (Reilly does give you a sense of the absurdity of the sheer number of Catholic conversions in this story! Seriously, he doesn\u2019t even get to the part where Lord Alfred Douglas also dies a Catholic.) You get a hint of Wilde\u2019s insistent, recurring identification with Jesus\u2013an identification which had lots of different meanings depending on when and in what mood he was writing\u2013but it doesn\u2019t really add up to anything. There\u2019s a bit toward the very end where Wilde seems to discover the God within, which echoes the book\u2019s title but seems to give egotism something too close to the last word. (The actual ending is ambiguous but at least suggests that Wilde reached for and found something outside his own overblown self.) I think anyone reading this without much preexisting knowledge of the decadent movement would wonder why on earth people suddenly are all becoming Catholics, I mean where did that even come from?<\/p>\n

The book does give you a really strong sense of the undertow of alcoholism, the way it allows the Wilde character especially to postpone taking necessary actions. Some people might find that a reductive and psychologizing explanation for how he managed to get himself embroiled in Douglas\u2019s feud with his father, but it\u2019s written pretty convincingly here. You feel the exhaustion and the desire to watch the concerns of the moment dissolve with the ice: Wilde is like the girl in the Elliot Smith song, who \u201cfights problems with\/bigger problems\u2026.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

So, you know, light entertainment about personal tragedy and redemption.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"