Lee Pefley—Sociopath and Sage Derek Turner enjoys the last (and weirdest) installment of Lee Pefley's fictional life Fields of Asphodel By Tito Perdue Overlook Press, New York, 2007 Fields of Asphodel is the latest of Tito Perdue's five critically acclaimed satires detailing the uproarious, curmudgeonly life of reactionary anti-hero Leland (Lee) Pefley. It is impossible to review this book in isolation, so we need to know what has gone before—all the more necessary for a mostly British audience, because for some inexplicable reason, Perdue has never been published in the United Kingdom. The first book was Lee, which appeared in 1991. This features Pefley as an old man who has gone back to his Alabama hometown to die and who beguiles the tedious time by hitting or fantasizing about hitting those he sees as ignorant or ugly, and generally making himself as disagreeable as possible. He is a man characterized by overweening arrogance and a generic loathing for the modern world, and gnawed by disillusion, loneliness (his deceased wife Judy is constantly in his thoughts) and a profound melancholia. Lee received rave reviews from just about everyone who read it, except for one or two primmer journals which seemed to have felt that surreal originality, a vigorous prose style, profound culture, mordant humour, marvellous characterization and moving evocations were all very well, but they couldn't counterbalance Lee's 'snobbishness'. But astuter critics were more or less united in their view that here was a Southern Samuel Beckett or James Joyce for the 1990s. The New Austerities (1994) was a prequel, which showed Lee packing in his detested insurance job in New York, and driving back down to Dixie with Judy in a car on which he has only made one payment, drifting down an hallucinogenically-imagined east coast, mostly by night, believing that Alabama may be their Land of Potential Content. But he finds when he gets there that the bucolic, conservative, unregimented South of his memory or imagination has become 'the New South', an increasingly unfree and homogenized place, where pick-up trucks driven by hard-faced, self-reliant farmers are being replaced by nearly new cars driven by soft executives in suits. Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture (also 1994) is a pre-prequel, this time leapfrogging two generations backwards to Lee's grandfather Ben, born and raised in Alabama just after the Civil War (which Perdue may think of as the War of Northern Aggression). Ben is a dreamer (as Lee will be), the son of a dreamer and with brothers who are so impractical that they become alcoholics and die young. Unsuccessful as a shop assistant and as a farmer, yet gifted with a curious literary talent, he eventually lands a job as a rural postman, the area's first—ironically heralding the start of the systematization his descendant (who appears towards the end as a young boy, "the most serious and glum of his descendants") will hate so much. Opportunities is filled with time elisions and sideslips, set in an Alabama that is part modern but also part prehistoric (Perdue is moderately obsessed by the Cenozoic period). It is also suffused with the essence of childhood—close observation of small things and acceptance of the status quo, blended with wonder at the strangeness and size of the world. (Sheer wonder is a recurring motif in Perdue's writings—one that is too rare in today's nil admirari writing.) The fourth book in the series is The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004), which returns to Lee's own life, following his journey at the age of 18 from Alabama to university in the North. He finds new books and peers, but most of all he finds Judy, his perfect mate, who thereafter becomes the lodestone of his life. Although all of Perdue's books are partly autobiographical, this is perhaps the most obviously personal, conveying beautifully the bittersweet ardency that is the common lot of many young adults. It is redeemed from being saccharine by Lee's ever-present knowledge that youth and health and optimism are highly perishable fruits. He is hauntingly aware that the fresh female face he strokes today will be furrowed tomorrow, and the day after that they will both be "tumbling forever among the stars." So we come to Fields of Asphodel—without a doubt the strangest of five very strange books. It is difficult to know how to do justice to a book that combines a comforting (and quite traditional Christian) faith with conversations with God about 1950s music, courtly archaisms with crude street slang, eldritch imagery with allusions to medieval theology, philosophical points (some arguably a little ponderous) with haemorrhoid-related humour. But it is safe to presume that it will be the last in the series, as now Lee is dead, yet still sentient, searching for Judy across a twilit landscape resembling a limbo dreamed up by a visionary painter. Far from being the Elysian place the title suggests, it is bleak and ugly, filled with ill-conditioned people of the sort Lee hoped he would have left behind on earth. Lee still has his bodily ailments and infirmities, to which are added wet, cold and hunger, and the discomfiture of meeting intellectual equals who are able to defeat him in verbal sparring matches, as they all shuffle or limp across a freezing and largely featureless landscape towards the hoped-for "higher domains." On the way, he is sometimes scourged—being made to perform meaningless tasks, being pelted with cabbage, being interviewed by officials, working as a salesman, being called a fascist for raising his hat to a woman, being threatened with death for 'having no compassion', having his shoes stolen and having everyone refusing his Canadian currency. But there are also compensations along the purgatorial way, such as warmer weather, caning officials and sales managers, meeting some of his revered Greek philosophers (famously doomed by Dante to remain in limbo because despite their manifold qualities they had been unlucky enough to live in pre-Christian times), is offered a job binding books by hand, sees voluptuaries being eaten alive by pigs or having molten gold poured into their mouths while whole cities burn in the far distance. Eventually, he can see "mountains of royal blue where shepherds were harassing each other with trumpet calls", and he knows he is nearing his apotheosis. Entering the personally customized village at the far side of the desert (architecture and society circa 1910, flora and vegetation circa Silurian), he knows that he has finally been "transported into a legendary person." It would be easy to dismiss Lee Pefley (and by extension his creator) as distastefully fundamentalist. But although Lee's approach obviously goes too far, the Pefley/Perdue critique of modernity is of great importance, including such questions as—why are our countries increasingly characterized by angst, anger, alienation and anomie? Why do we produce no great art? Why does everything have to be so ugly? Why does nothing work properly? Why are our politicians so incompetent and untrustworthy? We should remember that Lee is not naturally bitter; his admittedly sociopathic traits are the by-products of what he sees (correctly) as a toxic society. Society has moved away from him. His chief hope has always been childishly simple—that people will try to live up to their potential, and that society should be as civilized as can be. That people and society always fall short is not his fault, but theirs; they (or we) have never really tried. They (or we) have unprecedented health, wealth and access to information and culture—yet the majority of us prefer to spend our time making and spending money, or reading about Kylie, or watching random agglomerations of men chasing after a ball. Lee's ideal appears on p. 231—"Always he had wanted a small world getting smaller, a fine people getting finer, all of them dwelling far apart in hand-build cottages on a glebe getting gorgeouser." Such a vision could surely appeal to very many people, not all of whom will be card-carrying 'reactionaries.' What he has always hated—and what we should likewise hate—is the contemporary cross-party concept of nations being economies with countries attached, instead of the other way around. The unlikeable, unforgettable character of Lee Pefley embodies a paradox—that some of those who seem by today's standards to be the most acerbic, the most misanthropic, the most 'irrelevant' and 'out of touch' may secretly be the greatest idealists of all. Derek Turner is the editor of the Quarterly Review