Pilgrim's Regress

GOG by Andrew Sinclair. 486 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

In the weirdest novel since John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy, British historian and playwright Andrew Sinclair mounts a time machine and takes a wild ride through history.

His hero, Gog, is a giant washed ashore naked on the Scottish coast near Edinburgh just after V-E day. Gog has no memory, and the only clues to his identity are tattoos on the back of his left and right hands reading Gog and Magog--the names of two giant wooden figures in the City of London.* The novel, fable or parable tells the story of Gog's pilgrimage from Edinburgh to London in quest of himself.

In a series of bizarre episodes, Gog finds himself involved with such hallucinatory historical characters as the Duke of Wellington, Cleopatra, and Alfred the Great, not to mention such odd fictive figures as the Bagman and the Crook. In a novel of this picaresque kind, an orgy is to be expected sooner or later. Gog's orgy comes promptly and seems to be under pre-Christian Druidic auspices, though the Marquis de Sade and Herr von Sacher-Masoch are present in postures appropriate to their eponymous status. Gog meets his spiritual twin, an evil ogre called Magog. He also finds a bastard brother, and eventually learns his own name, Arthur George Griffin. A baleful woman named Maire, who has made several attempts on his life, turns out to have been his wife, and she dotes on him because he is so perfectly persecutable.

Past Is Present. What is anyone to make of all this? It is way out, and redeemed from boredom, if not confusion, by Sinclair's great verbal felicity. He can, in the manner of James Joyce in his celebrated parody of all English prose since the Venerable Bede, catch the tone of class and time. One hilarious example is a meeting between Lady Chatterley and a real, rather than Law-rentian, gamekeeper who can't abide them words she 'ad picked oop from that Mellors, the previous incumbent. "Look at 'er," the keeper says bitterly, "Lady Chastity 'erself from the 'All! Visitin'! Canna keep 'er clothes on, neither! This is Lady Jane, 'er says, point-in' to where 'er shouldna."

Sinclair, who took five years in the writing of Gog (apart from a biography of President Harding and a historical study of Prohibition), has not quite made his purpose clear. Speculation suggests that in Gog and Magog he is trying to make explicit the evil and good in man, a Manichaean notion that influenced Robert Louis Stevenson in writing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A more subtle Jungian notion is that Gog (i.e., man) is not only himself but also the sum of the past of the whole race. The naked amnesiac on the shores of Scotland must relive the whole of history before he can find the structure of his own soul. History being what it is, this is a bleak and troubling thought.

The last thing Gog discovers is his conscience, a capacity to make choices for the first time. Ironically, it does him no good. The book ends with Pilgrim Gog, like Bunyan's Mr. Facing-bothways, approaching a fork in the road--or history--on his weary way out of London. And "he does not know which way. . . ."

*Mentioned in the Bible, the giants Gog and Magog crop up in British folklore as offspring of the Emperor Diocletian's 33 wicked daughters, who were cast up on the shores of Albion and fell in with demons. Portrayed as bogeymen in chains, the giants were carved in wooden figures 14 feet high in order to protect the City of London.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.