Lempriere's Dictionary

Few discerning readers will care to hack through this choked jungle of historical fiction, fantasy and myth, despite the obvious intelligence and erudition British first novelist Norfolk displays here. John Lempriere, an actual 18th-century classicist and mythographer, perceives the world through the lenses of Greek and Latin fables. When he sees his father mangled by hunting dogs, just after both have witnessed a naked girl--John's adored Juliette--bathing in a forest stream, this evocation of Actaeon and Diana goads Lempriere to ``lay the ghosts to Antiquity'' by compiling his famed Dictionary . In 19th-century London, ancient ghosts proliferate. Lampriere views Pork Club revelers as Circe's swine; a grotesquely murdered woman who was fed molten gold is perceived as Danae, seduced by Jove in a golden rain; a Juliette lookalike, slain in a goatskin, is a latter-day Iphigenia. Interlarded is a bloated subplot, delineating a scam enacted generations earlier by a party of East India traders, which in 1627 led to Richelieu's crushing siege of the French city of La Rochelle when Huguenots sided with the English. During an eerie trance (paralleling the underworld visits of heroes Ulysses and Aeneas) Lempriere learns of his ancestor's meddling in the traders' ``Cabbala.'' It is the phantoms of history who drove him to authorship. Norfolk's superimposition of mythic patterns on urban life implies a model in James Joyce's Ulysses. While his scheme misfires, he is a writer of talent who may yet write a better novel. (Sept.)