Legpull

By Stefan Kanfer

THE GREAT VICTORIAN COLLECTION by BRIAN MOORE 213 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $7.95.

The Victorians, as Chesterton observed, were "lame giants; the strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other." It was an epoch of elegance and kitsch, dignity and pornography, liberal cant and imperial overreach. It is this instability that enlivens--and afflicts--Brian Moore's novel, The Great Victorian Collection.

The collection is literally dreamed up by a young scholar vacationing in California. One night Anthony Maloney falls asleep in an obscure motel, imagining a priceless array of artifacts. In the morning, a flea market of Victoriana awaits him in a parking lot below. Each objet d'art has been produced by his richly informed subconscious. Naturally there are the classic ottomans and clawfoot sofas, the glut of silver tea sets and bridal breakfast services. But there are also treasures from the velvet underground: choice items of bondage, plush Sadean literature, punishment costumes featuring removable posterior panels. It is all only a dream, of course. But in a way, Moore reminds us, so were the Victorians, and their residue remains as solid as mahogany.

As newsmen and occultists descend upon the miracle worker, Maloney tests his vision. Is it fact or figment? He attempts, mentally, to remove a single item. Suddenly its underside is marked MADE IN JAPAN. The scholar becomes a prisoner of his obsession, forced to preserve the dream by repeating it every night. But reality is inexorable. Restaurants and boutiques spring up around collection and collector: the Florence Nightingale Tearoom, the Oscar Wilde Way Out. Spectators come to gawk at the thinker, not the thought; finally even the erotic kinks are removed by relentless commercial vulgarity.

On its witty veneer, the Victorian Collection may be seen as a fable of art at a time when people prefer criticism to novels and autographs to painting. But there is something darker at work here: a claustrophobic sense of a century closing in on possessions, values, souls. It is this aspect that Moore slights. He introduces 19th century complications: an involved, but strangely chaste affair, a faceless enemy, a gaggle of venal sycophants. Then he seems to lose patience with these promising elements, and before 200 pages are out, Maloney hurtles to an abrupt martyrdom. The blueprint remains; the major work is never constructed.

Upon reading The Great Victorian Collection, Graham Greene praised the author as "my favorite living novelist, [who] treats the novel as a tamer treats a wild beast." The encomium is understandable but slightly out of synch. Like Greene, Moore writes both serious works of art and prinking entertainments. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and Catholics placed Moore in the front rank of contemporary writers. Whatever its intentions, the Collection ends as a Great Victorian Legpull. And pace Greene, this time it is the short limb that is being pulled.

Stefan Kanfer

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