영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 버클리 광장의 예언자
로버트 히첸스의 《버클리 광장의 예언자》는 19세기 후반을 배경으로 한 소설로, 예언과 가족, 그리고 일상과 신비로운 것의 교차점을 탐구한다. 이야기는 버클리 광장의 안락한 집에서 기이한 할머니 메릴리아 부인과 함께 사는 헤네시 비비언, 애칭으로 예언자라 불리는 인물을 중심으로 전개된다. 점성술과 예언에 점점 더 깊이 빠져들면서, 그는 자신의 새로운 능력이 지닌 의미와 씨름하게 된다. 특히 그 능력이 할머니의 삶에서 실제 사건들과 공명하는 것처럼 보일 때 더욱 그러하다. 이야기의 서두에서 독자들은 망원경으로 밤하늘을 관측할 준비를 하는 예언자를 만난다. 그는 별을 바라보면서도 집사 퍼디난드 씨와 함께 일상적인 의무들을 처리하고 있다. 극장으로 야간 외출을 한 할머니에 대한 예언자의 걱정은, 그녀가 돌아올 때 도움이 필요하지는 않을까 하는 의문으로 이어진다. 이 의문은 그가 할머니의 임박한 사고에 대해 세운 예언을 불안하게 떠올리면서 더욱 깊은 의미를 띠게 된다. 예언자와 메릴리아 부인, 그리고 하인들 사이의 상호작용은 희극적이고 철학적인 뉘앙스를 풍기며, 운명과 선택, 그리고 예언적 책임의 무게라는 더 깊은 탐구를 위한 무대를 마련한다. 도입부의 장들은 가정적인 배경뿐 아니라 복잡한 인물 간의 역학 관계를 확립하며, 급속히 현대화되는 세계 속에서 예언이 차지하는 역할에 대한 기발하면서도 사색을 자극하는 탐구를 제시한다.
Classics Read in English _ The Prophet of Berkeley Square by Robert Hichens
There is something inherently comic about a prophet who worries.
And yet Hennessey Vivian — known to Berkeley Square, to his grandmother, and to his long-suffering butler Mr. Ferdinand simply as the Prophet — worries constantly. He worries about the stars, which speak to him in languages he is only beginning to decipher. He worries about fate, which appears to be rather less flexible than he had hoped. And on this particular evening, with his telescope trained on a sky indifferent to the domestic anxieties of Edwardian London, he worries most acutely about his grandmother.
Mrs. Merillia has gone to the theatre. This is, objectively, an unremarkable fact. Elderly ladies go to the theatre every evening across the length and breadth of the city, and return home safely with nothing more calamitous to report than a disappointing second act. But Mrs. Merillia is not every elderly lady, and Hennessey is not every grandson — and he has made, in a moment of astrological confidence that he is now bitterly regretting, a prophecy concerning her return.
Robert Hichens constructs the world of Berkeley Square with the precision and warmth of a man who finds human folly genuinely delightful rather than merely contemptible. The Prophet is not a charlatan and not quite a mystic — he is something more endearing and more complicated than either: a man of sincere and bewildered gifts, navigating the treacherous distance between cosmic revelation and the practicalities of getting an elderly woman safely through the front door.
The Prophet of Berkeley Square is a novel about what happens when the infinite and the intimate collide — when the weight of prophetic responsibility lands squarely in the middle of a perfectly ordinary drawing room. Hichens asks, with enormous wit and surprising tenderness, whether foreknowledge is a gift or simply a more refined form of anxiety. The stars, for their part, decline to answer. They merely shine on — magnificent, unhurried, and entirely unconcerned with the affairs of Berkeley Square.
Among the contents
The great telescope of the Prophet was carefully adjusted upon its lofty, brass-bound stand in the bow window of Number One Thousand Berkeley Square. It pointed towards the remarkably bright stars which twinkled in the December sky over frosty London, those guardian stars which always seemed to the Prophet to watch with peculiar solicitude over the most respectable neighbourhood in which he resided. The polestar had its eye even now upon the mansion of an adjacent ex-premier, the belt of Orion was not oblivious of a belted earl’s cosy red-brick home just opposite, and the house of a certain famous actor and actress close by had been taken by the Great Bear under its special protection.
The Prophet’s butler, Mr. Ferdinand—that bulky and veracious gentleman—threw open the latticed windows of the drawing-room and let the cold air rush blithely in. Then he made up the fire carefully, placed a copy of Mr. Malkiel’s Almanac, bound in dull pink and silver brocade by Miss Clorinda Dolbrett of the Cromwell Road, upon a small tulip-wood table near the telescope, patted a sofa cushion affectionately on the head, glanced around with the meditative eye of the butler born not made, and quitted the comfortable apartment with a salaried, but soft, footstep.
