The Aspern Papers (Hardcover)

is the narrator amoral? yes his intentions are to become a boarder in the home of a former lover to the famous poet john aspern in order to get the letters he wrote to her. he does this through subterfuge. yet he has his limits. he won't court the spinster niece in order to get her help. he is actually quite honest and up front with her regarding his intentions when the time for deceipt comes. he also refuses to force her to do what she cannot.

the question becomes--is he the duper or the dupee? the actions of the women can easily be interpreted to reflect that they are willing to use the letters to entrap him to "become part of the family". he is continually induced to stay on by inference of help from the neice. the aunt also is part of a potential plot. she teases him with visits and a picture of aspern. does he get what he wants when he marries the niece?

as in the turn of the screw, this turn in the story is not made clear until the end. in order to find out who gets what, you'll have to read the book.

this story is good enough to make me think again about reading more james.

Of course, there is a defining element of James' art that is impossible in the theatre - narration. The nameless narrator of 'The Aspern Papers' is one of the greatest monsters in James' teeming gallery of inglorious masculinity - the editor of a revered American literary poet, who tries to wheedle important documents from a celebrated lover, the now-decrepit Juliana, by installing himself as a lodger, and flattering her aging spinster niece. Like most James heroes, who treat life like a selfish game, he has no idea what emotional havoc he is wreaking on the woman.

The tale has all the drive and tantalising delay of a crime story - the hero is both detective and criminal, and the suspenseful climax suggests what a great genre writer James could have been. As with Stendhal, just as exciting are the intricate, agonising dialogues between the narrator and the niece, each wildly misunderstanding the other.

But if 'Aspern' is a crime story, than the the criminal is of the order of Freddie Montgomery in Banville's 'The Book of Evidence', a brilliant, charming, frighteningly amoral man, whose check of social scruples is dicarded with shocking ease. His seemingly over-detailed account is full of gaps, self-defence, self-pity, evasion, vagueness, misremembering, disarming honesty and wild misinterpreations of others' characters and motives. He is a man who can't see beyond his own narrow goal, behind whom we always sense an unseen, all-seeing eye.

He is the forerunner to a second modern anti-hero, 'Pale Fire''s Charles Kinbote, another literary editor whose devotion to his subject has become mad and murderous. In a Victorian age full of cant about the ennobling power of art, James asserts, disturbingly, the opposite - repeated exposure to sublime poetry (and the book is full of ironic references to religion and glorious war) has only made the narrator emotinally dead, unable to respond to the humanity of others. This 'portrait' of an aging muse, malevolent and concupiscent is a stark warning to literary idealisers, and a sad study of human decline, but should also be seen as a reflection of the narrator's own desires.

'Aspern' is incidentally THE great Venice story, its watery decay somehow seeping through the narrator's blind egotism.