A late Benson novel which may disappoint anyone in search of the bizarreries of Mapp, Lucia and his other comic triumphs. It may also disappoint some of us who rate Benson as a writer to be reckoned with. Set in collegiate Cambridge and later in Cornwall, the protagonists are a young don, Maurice Crofts and an impossibly 'beautiful' undergraduate called Steven Gervase. Steven is in search of some intangible, primaeval emotional and spiritual reality or truthfulness and sees in Maurice a fellow-traveller. Much of the novel is taken up chronicling Maurice's obsession with Steven, his subsequent realisation that the unconditional nonconformity of his beloved involves an inhuman degree of selfishness and absence of basic fellow feeling and Steven's inability to turn away from the lure of the wild satyric rites he enjoys in the woods of his Cornish estates and become the father and gentleman that the world expects him to be. Crucial to the plot and possibly destructive to the credibility of the novel on a narrative level is the detail that the Gervases are subject to a devastating curse(that's a real curse, folks) which involves the first-born son of each generation being blighted by appalling physical and mental abnormality. Steven's much-vaunted 'beauty' gives the world hope that the malediction has run its course but it has simply gone to ground and manifests itself in him in the sociopathic emotional sterilty he shows to everyone.

The suggestion that all of this in someway metaphoric seems unnecessary. The homerotic is never anywhere other than on the surface---even Steven's hapless wife Betty is described as looking like a boy--- and so there is no particular effort required to discern that Benson's chief concern is homosexuality and its consequences. The novel might work successfully, if unpleasantly, on the premise of discussing the thesis that, while the attraction of homosexual emotions are understandable and even pleasurable when they are aroused by-- and expressed in --someone as extraordinary as Steven Gervase,any attempt to act upon them is repellent, dangerous and destructive. Benson had previously expressed his (at least official) revulsion at same-gender sex in David Blaize, Michael and a range of other non-comic novels but The Inheritor displays a fascination with the abyss which is, in itself, off-putting, to say the least. That the theme has him so resolutely in its grip is suggested by the fact that his usual gifts seem to have abandoned him. The book is clogged with lengthy nocturnes---passages in which 'beautiful' young men(no plain chaps allowed) disappear into woodland wildernesses and onto wave-lapped shores to run and swim, romp and generally lotus-eat. None of these, after the first, justify the volume of words expended on them and most are run through with a sense of being horribly fascinated by something that is,to its author, quite literally obscene and unspeakable --and all the better for that. The novel leans heavily of a number of predecessors---Dorian Gray, Jekyll and Hyde, even Gilbert and Sullivan---but none of the ingredients are blended and worked in sufficiently to disguise their origins. Surprisingly, even his comic gifts desert him--one passage in the Combination Room has a collection of dons exchanging end-of-term bon mots in which Benson manages to plagiarise even himself. The object of the scene may be to assert the dullness and sterility of academic life (contrasted to the wild bacchanalian frenzy of Steven's Cornish idyll)but it merely succeeds in making its author seem uninterested and twitchy to return to the physical charms of his anti-hero. Most peculiar is Benson's evocation of the faerie twilight that is Cornwall---most definitely 'another country' in his opinion and utterly antithetical to the stiff propriety that inhibits its neighbours over the bridge in England. Everyone in Cornwall is 'beautiful', everyone knows their place and everyone expresses themselves in an outlandish patois which, like so much else in the novel, evokes more the world of comic opera and the transpontine melodrama than anywhere anyone has actually ever lived. It's as though Benson had read Cold Comfort Farm and taken it at face value.

Readers these days will see echoes of a whole range of uranist fiction of the period--- in which youth and beauty are at once celebrated and despised, championed and feared. It's a fascinating document in terms of a particular moment in gay history and letters and its author's sense of being constricted and debarred from being able to deal directly with his subject is both frustrating and poignant. ' Unavailable for sixty years' the editor informs us that The Inheritor also represents Benson at the height of his powers. Even for a bookseller's blurb, the claim is as far-fetched as the book it describes.