Paley's keystone claim is that "there cannot be design without a designer; contrivance, without a contriver; order, without choice;…means suitable to an end, and executing their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been contemplated".
The hero and the contriver merge into an omnipotent artificer.
The author, the contriver of these dozen intertwining viewpoints, is both outside and inside his fiction.
My sandwiches were sodden, falling to bits, and bright red from large lumps of paternally cut beetroot; they blushed for me as I blushed for their contriver.
The King, struck with horror that anyone could entertain such inhuman ideas, said that some evil genius, enemy to mankind must have been the first contriver".
And as Robinson in Ruins attests again, he's an incisive, poised and frequently hilarious writer, contriver of a prose voice with no equals among contemporary British filmmakers and, in terms of intellectual range and mordant wit, few among recent novelists.
But, like Mark Antony, Phyllida Lloyd is a "shrewd contriver"; and her all-female production of Julius Caesar is witty, liberating and inventive, and taps into the anti-authoritarian instinct that runs through the play.
In O'Brian, on the contrary, I am reading the work of an artificer, a contriver of genius and, well, a liar.
