Originally Posted by
Pompey Bum
Well, to each his own. The characters are Dickension and certainly subject to Dickens' sometimes cartoonish standards of satire. If you don't know and like Dickens, you probably won't get that much out of The Quincunx. As for the book being badly written because you didn't sympathize with anyone, it's not that kind of a novel--by which I mean it rejects/ignores the all too familiar "how to write popular fiction" orthodoxy. It really wasn't intended for that market. Palliser was an obscure academic when he wrote it and was just playing around with postmodern ideas about pastiche (and some ideas of his own). I don't think anyone expected The Quincunx to become a bestseller--especially Palliser. Maybe ten years after The Quincunx, he wrote a (reasonably good) bestseller called The Unburied, which is probably more what you want (the protagonist is likable in any case). Ten years after that he wrote Rustication, which I don't think made much money. The main character is highly unlikable (intentionally) and the tone is nasty without any of The Quincunx's Dickensian charm. I thought Rustication was a better book than The Unburried, but it doesn't surprise me that it didn't sell. The rest of Palliser's books are postmodern academic la-de-da.
