WRIGHT’S LAST WORK

Wright's last work, nearly finished when he died in 1966, is composed in wide sweeping strokes, adding insult, injury, and absurdity to the main themes of his previous novels. Set at the turn of the 17th century, Wright follows the life of Edward Sutton, 5th Baron Dudley, sometimes known as the English Leonardo da Vinci, as he transforms Dudley Castle and the manors of Dudley into a coke-fired furnace of passion and commerce. As always, Wright spikes his narrative with the juxtaposition of historical fact and erotic intrigue, creating a fugue of ecstacy, as he did in Caveat Emptor 1942, and The Monkey Season 1945, but for hardcore Wright fans the heart of this book will be the long chapter entitled "Questionable Coupling." This section includes a graphic description of Dudley’s liaisons with his longterm mistress Elizabeth Tomlinson, who bore him a large family of illegitimate children. The 57th chapter, "The Structure of Iron," on the other hand, reads like the tax code as Wright drags the reader though Dudley’s struggles with his incompetent son, Dud Dudley, as Dud single-handedly destroys everything Lord Dudley has worked his entire life to create. While Wright 's obtuse wording, and tendency toward sentences several pages in length can seem to mock his brilliant insights into the grand structures of the human condition, and often make the reader want to end his own life, Wright’s brilliance still manages to shine through and even decades after his death, Wright is still at the top of the heap.