The Temple of Optimism

Part historical novel, part revisionist tract, part smirking pastiche of the 19th-century domestic melodrama, this first novel from Scottish author Fleming has plenty of panache, but little punch. In 1788, Edward Horne, an eccentric, jocular young man, is persuaded by his ailing mother to leave the excitements of London and return to manage Winterbourne, his family's crumbling rural estate. Upon his arrival, his almost ridiculously pastoral hometown is sent into a minor frenzy of gossip and speculation. Edward is soon befriended by a wealthy landowner, Sir Anthony Apreece, whose avuncular charm conceals an insatiable rapacity and a killer instinct. A triangle of furious covetousness soon develops: Edward finds himself more and more taken with Apreece's pious, beautiful wife, Daisy, while Sir Anthony becomes increasingly desperate to add Winterbourne to his vast holdings. Fleming's prose pushes the melodrama in startlingly unconventional directions; in scene after scene, gentility devolves into near-violent hostility, exposing the greed and solipsism that lay beneath the 18th-century class system. The emotional and political complexity hinted at here, though, is undermined by Fleming's indiscriminate deployment of historical detail, much of which comes straight from British Cultural History 101. (The men in the novel read Tristram Shandy while the women read PamelaDjust one example of how Fleming refers to general trends of the era rather than dealing with specifics.) The most simplistic glossing of the past occurs at the novel's anachronistic denouement, which substitutes wishful thinking for principled revisionism.Finally, this novel is too riddled with compromise and ideological backtracking to attain a broad readershipDthough the author used to be a bookseller, and so could prove a valuable partner in promotional efforts. Fleming can divert, but fails to subvert. (Nov.)