Rumpole’s creator off his game

IS there anything worse than being the object of someone’s good intentions?

The warmly inchoate impulse to “do a little good” bears about as much resemblance to that self-consuming virtue we call charity as soft porn does to passion. In both cases, the former is, irritatingly, all around us; the latter, sadly, in rather short supply.

In “Quite Honestly: A Novel,” the astonishingly prolific English writer and playwright John Mortimer means to have a little pointed fun with that fact.

He may have; most readers won’t.

Mortimer, who will be 83 next month, has written his way to remarkable success in several genres. He probably is best known to American audiences as the creator of Horace Rumpole, the cunning and fiercely -- if secretly -- idealistic “Old Bailey hack” who, unlike other British barristers, always defends and refuses to prosecute. (British trial lawyers usually do both.) Leo McKern’s portrayal made Rumpole a memorable presence on public television, and defense attorneys will tell you that the character comes closer to embodying the authentic spirit of their practice than almost any other in contemporary fiction. Mortimer has translated operas and written memoirs, numerous plays and an autobiographical drama, “A Voyage Round My Father,” which starred Laurence Olivier as the elder Mortimer, himself a famous divorce lawyer.

Now Sir John Clifford Mortimer Q.C., the writer is a well-known defender of civil liberties, particularly speech, and has been called “the most famous television dramatist to have defended a murder at the Old Bailey.” Beginning in the mid-1980s, he spun off a series of shrewdly observed and wickedly funny satiric novels, including “Summer’s Lease” and “Paradise Postponed” (which is the first of a sequence that chronicled the fictional Rapstone Valley from the end of World War II to Margaret Thatcher). A Labor Party intellectual with a profound aversion to the Conservatives, piety in any disguise and political correctness, Mortimer had no trouble sticking it to the parties on both sides of the parliamentary aisle and their generic supporters.

“Quite Honestly” sets out to explore similar territory. In fact, readers of Mortimer’s earlier novels and stories will find a rather large number of all-too-familiar characters in all-too-familiar relation to society and those around them. In this instance, a young female protagonist, Lucinda Purefoy, has recently graduated from university and delays a career in advertising to do “a little good.” To that end, she joins Social Carers, Reformers and Praeceptors (SCRAP), an organization that provides mentors to newly released convicts. The object of Lucinda’s good intentions is handsome young hereditary criminal, Terry Keegan, whose specialite is breaking and entering by night, and Lucinda’s vaguely idealistic good intentions have hardly prepared her for a pragmatism she finds thrilling on several levels.

Terry’s attitude toward SCRAP, which he initially mistakes for a “terrorist organization,” builds on his experience in the ETS classes (Enhanced Thinking Studies) he has taken in jail:

“ ‘They asked you at the start what you were thinking and you had to say, ‘I was thinking how great it’d be to go out on Saturday night and get pissed and hit someone’s head with a hammer.’

“ ‘If you said something like that, you started from a low point and your thinking could only improve you. So the ETS person gave you a good report, which helped towards parole.’ ”

In relatively short order, Lucinda and Terry are in her bed and his business together.

This sounds like more fun that it is, because none of it seems to happen for any reason other than the author’s desire to make a point. The novel’s funniest character is Lucinda’s father, the Anglican bishop of Aldershot and advocate for a Christianity attenuated into little more than a set of good impulses. He has the novel’s best turns, particularly an introductory conversation with Terry and an appearance at Lucinda’s bail hearing that degenerates into a debate with the court over homosexual marriage. (Hint: The bishop is for it.)

Mortimer’s attitude toward the contemporary church is best summed up in this exchange from his 1990 novel, “Titmuss Regained,” in which the local aristocrat, Lady Fanner, tells the village cleric that she’s been reading the Bible:

“The Rector of Rapstone, Kevin Bulstrode, known to many of his parishioners as Kev the Rev., looked at her as though this activity were a sign of mental weakness, like astrology or studying the measurements of the Great Pyramid.

“ ‘Not the Old Testament,’ he asked nervously.

” ’Particularly the Old Testament. What a swine God was, most of the time.’ Lady Fanner said this with a tight smile of admiration. ‘Smiting people in a way I’ve hardly ever done. Right, left and centre.’

“ ‘I don’t think we see God as so much of a smiter nowadays,’ Kev the Rev. explained. ‘We see him more as the depth of our being.’

“ ‘Certainly the depth of my being,’ Lady Fanner agreed. ‘Smiting away like that. Bully for him!’ ”

This is the kind of dialogue you’d expect from a one-time radio dramatist, but there’s really nothing to match it in “Quite Honestly.” The bishop of Aldershot is a rather pale reminder of Simeon Simcox, the anti-nuclear crusader and celebrity socialist rector of Rapstone Fanner, whom Mortimer set at the center of “Paradise Postponed.” Lucinda is a wan reminder of Simcox’s hopelessly conflicted and confused son, the atheist country doctor and jazz drummer, Fred.

The point this time around seems to be that Lucinda and everyone on her side of the law quite honestly believe in nothing but the urge to do “a bit of good.” This makes them ripe for seduction -- or is it conversion? Terry and his set, on the other hand, actually believe in a primary school sort of heaven and hell, along with the recreational excitement and economic utility of breaking and entering by night. The dithering and directionless do-gooders are drawn into the confident criminality of Terry and his pals like loose iron filings to a moral magnet. Terry et al. are more than happy to use their new recruit to take the operation further up market.

Unhappily, not a word of it is believable.

This isn’t satire, it’s sentimentality.

The difficulty is there from the start, latent in the author’s choice of epigraphs. One is from “King Lear,” Act 4, Scene 6: “handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” The other is Browning’s couplet: “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things / The honest thief, the tender murderer.”

You see the problem.

Mortimer has said elsewhere that farce is actually tragedy played at a very high speed. Unfortunately, this novel’s narrative velocity, which is considerable, quite honestly doesn’t get us anywhere. At the top of his game, the author probably would have made something interesting of this book’s structural conceit, which is that both Lucinda and Terry speak in the first-person, rehearsing each scene from their individual perspective in an ongoing mutual misunderstanding. In this instance, however, the result is reminiscent of one of those made-up duets in which studio engineers superimpose one singer’s voice on another’s recording.

In the end, what you’ve got is something like an electric can opener -- a device whose virtues are minor and wholly mechanical. That’s never truer than in the book’s final sequence, which is cinema-style preposterous. It’s meant to be a twist, but comes off as drearily inevitable rather than surprising.

Mortimer once quipped that “the shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.” That’s certainly true of “Quite Honestly,” which already seems a bit past its expiration date.