Point Counter Point

Set in 1920s London, the novel follows a large cast of intellectuals, artists, politicians, and socialites whose intertwining lives illustrate the fragmentation and spiritual emptiness of modern civilization. The narrative moves between characters in a contrapuntal structure modeled on musical form, alternating perspectives and storylines much as voices alternate in a fugue.

Walter Bidlake, a young writer on the staff of a literary magazine called the Literary World, lives unhappily with Marjorie Carling, a woman who left her abusive, alcoholic husband to be with him. Marjorie is pregnant and devoted, but Walter has fallen obsessively in love with Lucy Tantamount, the coolly predatory daughter of Lord Edward Tantamount, a distinguished biologist. Walter leaves Marjorie one evening to attend a musical party at the Tantamount family mansion in Pall Mall, consumed by guilt yet unable to resist Lucy's pull.

The party at Tantamount House introduces the novel's social world. Old John Bidlake, Walter's father, a celebrated painter and lifelong sensualist, whispers irreverently through a performance of Bach. Lady Edward Tantamount, the hostess, is a small, dark-eyed Canadian who delights in engineering socially embarrassing encounters. Among the guests are Everard Webley, the charismatic founder of the Brotherhood of British Freemen (B.B.F.), a green-uniformed paramilitary organization modeled loosely on fascist movements; Illidge, Lord Edward's communist laboratory assistant from a working-class Lancashire background who seethes with class resentment; and Denis Burlap, the editor of the Literary World, whose spiritual pretensions mask a manipulative nature. Upstairs, Lord Edward experiments on newts with Illidge, transplanting tissue to study regeneration, his absorbed scientific work contrasting sharply with the social performance below.

After the party, Walter and Lucy go to Sbisa's restaurant, where they join Maurice Spandrell, a gaunt, self-destructive nihilist whose debauchery is a perverse rebellion against his mother's remarriage to a military man, and Mark Rampion, a painter and writer of working-class origins whose philosophy of balance between body and spirit provides the novel's closest approximation to a moral center. Rampion attacks modern civilization for killing humanity's instinctive life through industrialism, Christianity, and intellectualism alike. An extended flashback recounts how Rampion, a scholarship boy from a mining town, met and married Mary Felpham, a vigorous aristocrat. Their marriage, built on mutual challenge and deep partnership, stands as the novel's only model of a fulfilled life.

Philip Quarles, a novelist married to Walter's sister Elinor, returns from India with his wife. Philip is brilliant but emotionally remote, living inside a shell of intellectual detachment that Elinor cannot penetrate. His notebook entries, scattered throughout the novel, articulate his ambitions for a new kind of fiction based on musical counterpoint and multiplicity of perspective, but also reveal his awareness that intellectual life is a form of escapism from the complexities of actual living.

Walter's pursuit of Lucy intensifies. She eventually becomes his mistress, but she refuses the tenderness he craves, treating their affair as amusement. She departs for Paris and writes him a series of witty, cruel letters, the last describing a casual sexual encounter with an Italian stranger, intended solely to wound him. Meanwhile, Marjorie, befriended by Philip's devout mother Rachel Quarles, undergoes a religious awakening and finds a fragile peace.

Burlap insinuates himself into the life of Beatrice Gilray, a repressed woman terrified of physical contact due to childhood molestation. He adopts a childlike, spiritually tender persona, gradually breaking down her defenses through a calculated performance of helplessness. At the Literary World, his hypocrisy drives his secretary Miss Cobbett, once a friend of his dead wife Susan, to bitter disillusionment; when Burlap eventually has her dismissed, she dies by suicide.

Philip's father, Sidney Quarles, is a pompous, self-deluding man whose grand ambitions mask profound mediocrity. His study brims with typewriters and filing cabinets that conceal the fact that he spends his mornings on crossword puzzles. He conducts a cheap affair with Gladys Helmsley, a young typist, who arrives uninvited at the family estate, furious and pregnant, to denounce him before his horrified wife Rachel.

Elinor, increasingly desperate over Philip's emotional unavailability, finds herself drawn to Everard Webley, whose passionate declarations represent everything Philip lacks. She watches Webley address a rally of his uniformed Freemen in Hyde Park and is physically thrilled by his commanding presence. He kisses her in a woodland glade, and she does not resist. Yet when a telegram arrives reporting that her young son, little Phil, is ill at the family estate of Gattenden, she treats the interruption as a rescue from a choice she dreads.

Spandrell seizes the opportunity created by Elinor's departure. She asks him to telephone Webley and cancel their meeting at the mews house. Instead, Spandrell calls Illidge, and together they ambush Webley when he arrives. Spandrell strikes him with a club; Illidge applies chloroform. The murder, which Spandrell had hoped would be a definitive encounter with absolute evil and thus a proof of God's existence through opposition, turns out to be merely sordid and stupid. They load the body into Webley's own car and leave it parked in St. James's Square.

At Gattenden, little Phil's illness proves to be meningitis. The child's suffering unfolds in stages of escalating horror: screaming pain, then deafness, then blindness, then wasting. Old John Bidlake, himself dying of a stomach tumor, superstitiously avoids the sickroom. One morning the boy suddenly rallies, smiles, and asks for food. Elinor is transfigured with relief. But hours later, the child dies.

Philip and Elinor prepare to leave England. Spandrell, who has concluded that the murder proved nothing about God or the devil, makes one final attempt to find evidence of the divine. He buys a gramophone and a recording of the slow movement of Beethoven's A minor string quartet, the heilige Dankgesang, a hymn of thanks from a convalescent to God composed in the Lydian mode. He insists that Rampion come hear it. Simultaneously, he sends an anonymous letter to the British Freemen giving his address and the hour, arranging his own execution.

Rampion and Mary arrive. The Lydian melody plays, transparent and crystalline, building toward a rapturous serenity. Rampion concedes it is almost persuasive but ultimately too disembodied to be fully human. A knocking comes at the door. Spandrell goes to answer it. Gunshots follow. The Rampions find three uniformed Freemen standing over his body. Through the open door, the music continues until there is nothing left but the scratching of the needle on the revolving disc.

The novel's final scene returns to Burlap and Beatrice. That night, they pretend to be two little children and take their bath together, splashing and romping. The book closes with a line of devastating irony: "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."