Resentment

John Sutherland

• Francesca by Roger Scruton
  Sinclair-Stevenson, 236 pp, £13.95, February 1991, ISBN 1 85619 048 X
• Slave of the Passions by Deirdre Wilson
  Picador, 251 pp, £14.99, February 1991, ISBN 0 330 31788 1
• The Invisible Worm by Jennifer Johnston
  Sinclair-Stevenson, 182 pp, £12.95, February 1991, ISBN 1 85619 041 2
• The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré
  Hodder, 335 pp, £14.95, January 1991, ISBN 0 340 54381 7

There are many Roger Scrutons and it is not easy to reconcile them: barrister, aesthetician, champion of Senator Joseph McCarthy, teacher at Birkbeck College (an institution with a tradition of proletarian outreach), editor of the ultra-Tory Salisbury Review foxhunter. And novelist. Fortnight’s Anger (1981) was hard-going – a murky tale of adolescent sexuality full of sentences like: ‘Her hands trembled on his face and neck. Slowly the agony of appeasement wormed through him, and his grief, unlocked at last, crawled out and shook itself on the surface of his face.’ That is, he wept. Scruton’s second novel, Francesca, is less overdone in its writing – although it too deals with the toils of adolescence. The ten-year interval has usefully congealed some of the Scruton parts. His prejudices seem now to have permeated all the fibres of his mind and sensibility, like smoke into well-cured bacon. Everything he writes now seems thoroughly Scrutonised. One feels a sense of gratified expectation at the snide allusions to the New Statesman, the Guardian and ‘Dr Leavis’ on page one of Francesca. This is the Roger Scruton we know and love to hate – Britain’s favourite ‘token reactionary’, as he sometimes calls himself.