Resolution
by AN Wilson, Atlantic Books, £16.99
This brilliant novel by AN Wilson concerns the Enlightenment, illustrated in the life of George Forster, a minor historical character of whom few of us may have heard.
As a youth, George, with his father, sails with Captain Cook on the Resolution to the South Seas. George helps to record the new species that his father catalogues. Afterwards, we follow George home to Germany, through his unhappy marriage, and into his involvement with the French Revolution.
Wilson could have written a biography of George, but that would not have been such fun as this novel, which excels not just as history, but also as comedy and tragedy.
In one life we see many contradictions. George starts as a perfect exemplar of enlightened virtue, a man of science, a careful recorder of phenomena, a discoverer of new worlds, who sails to fresh horizons. But he ends up, without ever having lost his essential goodness of heart, involved in the narrow world of Robespierre and Marat. How on earth did it come to this?
But this does not just happen to George – it happens to all of us. One moment we are recording things for posterity, the next we are watching a band of vandals demolishing Arras Cathedral. We humans are not very coherent creatures, something that the Enlightenment perhaps failed to grasp.
The novel is also a portrait of a very unhappy marriage. George and Therese are more than just ill-matched and unprepossessing; they discover the sad human truth about just how difficult it is to get on with someone else despite the best of wills.
Back in 1977, when he published his first novel, Wilson was a comic novelist. He still is, though the jokes are blacker than they once were, and perhaps more probing of human nature. The jokes illuminate the darkened vault of heaven like fireworks. They serve to remind us that we have tried to work out our own salvation (there is something Pelagian in the “resolution” of the title); we have tried and failed.
.jpg)
