1904 revenge-fiction. They laughed at George Arthur Rose at the
seminary, but now he'll show them – he'll show them all!
So well yes. This is a profoundly strange book by rather a
strange man. A failed candidate for the priesthood, denied his
vocation by the machinations of the Roman Catholic system, is admitted
after all… and becomes Pope… and sets the world to rights.
This is also a book quite devoid of sympathetic characters. Rolfe
clearly thinks he has written Good People and Bad People, but one has
met his Good People, particularly his self-insert Rose, the man who
knows in his bones that he is cleverer and better than anybody else
and has never thought to hide this opinion, then wonders why the
world's hand is turned against him (which is the only possible reason
for his lack of success).
But Rose as Hadrian has something Rolfe lacked throughout his life,
the authority to make people pay attention to him, and of course that
is all it takes for them to realise what a wonderful person he is and
Right about everything. Unless they are Evil.
As the Kaiser approached Him, He took the imperial hand and shook it
in the glad-to-see-you-but-keep-off English fashion.
Spring-dumb-bells had given the Pope a grip like a vice and an arm
like a steel piston-rod. The Emperor blinked once.
(Rolfe liked to style himself "Fr. Rolfe" in the hope people might
mistake him for a priest; and "Baron Corvo" on the unevidenced claim
of a late adoption by the Duchess Sforza Cesarini, who was safely dead
by the time this came out. In his favour can be said that he
apparently didn't prey on the children he instructed; he preferred
older teenage boys.)
Socialists, of course, are Evil, and that means anyone in favour of
anything less than absolute monarchy. (Kaiser Wilhelm II is definitely
one of the good guys here.) Rolfe is full of the petty suburban
jealousies of a man who just didn't get the breaks but it was always
someone else's fault, and he excoriates everyone who didn't give Rose
a chance – i.e. everyone.
They, the nations all were tumbling over one another in their
eagerness to re-arrange themselves upon the pattern which He had
devised for them.
Rolfe's writing style is oddly dry, perhaps a reaction to
fin-de-siècle flourish and ornamentation; but he'd much rather use a
obscure word that doesn't have quite the meaning he clearly wants than
one that would be readily understood.
It's much more fun in the summary than in the 120,000 words.
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