The Review of Contemporary Fiction
A Fifth of November by Paul WestDavid Madden
Paul West. A Fifth of November. New Directions, 2001. 340 pp. $25.95.
Readers familiar with Paul West know well that each new novel stands as an imaginative foray into the unexpected. In recent years he has concentrated on overlooked corners of history, as in his recent novel A Fifth of November, which is set in England in 1605 at a time when Roman Catholics, and especially priests, were a governmentally persecuted minority. In the figure of Father Henry Garnet, the leading Jesuit in England, West finds one of history’s forgotten heroes, a man of noble spirit and prodigious intellect who was accidentally embroiled in Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot. Garnet comes from West’s own native Derbyshire, and good portions of the novel draw regional distinctions between the plain-speaking priest and the conniving hypocrites from the south who pursue him. Also like West, Garnet is a linguist, a man intoxicated with words and their infinite beauty and elasticity; he wiles away his incarceration in “priest holes” and the Tower of London pondering etymologies, linguist errors, and malapropisms, and his own treatise on equivocation. The notion of equivocation, what Garnet calls “opening the mind to simultaneous possibilities and deciding to protect them both,” runs as a leitmotif throughout the novel. Garnet can see all sides of matters, find in his persecutors untapped potentialities for kindness and grace, and cling tenaciously to the futile hope of his own good fortune. As with any West novel, the triumph is the language itself. A master stylist, West parades one crystalline gem of a sentence after another, capturing minute shades of emotion and nuances of thought with his characteristic deft ease. He continually reminds readers that the novel is a genre of infinite adaptability for a mind fully deployed and sensitive to the subtleties of vibrant thought. [David Madden]