Customer Reviews

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

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Odd that this is the first review. Angus Wilson and this book are not exactly literary unknowns. Kate Winslet (yes, Titanic's Kate Winslet) appeared in the 1993 TV version of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

But back to the book. Prof Gerald Middleton world is re-built by confronting and uncovering certain truths - which he has evaded for forty years. Like the historian he is, Middleton re-constructs his past and in doing so really does re-enter the present. It really is a bit of a morality play but wonderfully funny with a perfect sense of closure at the end. Like Dickens or Tolstoy, there are innumerable characters.

The essential story line was formed around the Piltdown forgery. Piltdown man had just been declared a hoax in the early '50s. But for forty years those who knew or suspected kept quiet. Likewise, Prof Middleton suspects an archaeological hoax of a similar kind committed forty years ago by friends and colleages. But he says nothing. Until ... well, that is essentially the beginning of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

An English friend involved in archeology introduced me to the concept of the essential importance of the provenance of an artifact in determining its significance. The artifact must be viewed within the context in which it was found, otherwise it is meaningless. The provenance of an idol, involving a sad practical joke, and deeper Oedipal emotions is the heart of Wilson's novel. This one joke reverberated throughout the English medievalist academic world for 50 years, and one reflects on the old aphorism that the quarrels in academia are so bitter because the stakes are often so trivial. Was it of any significance to anyone that a famous 7th Century bishop might have backslide into apostasy?

Perhaps the provenance of the idol is a useful metaphor for examining English society in the mid-50's. The significant cast of characters, drawn from a broad swath of that society, act out their fates based on their own location within the society. Yet there will always be some upward mobility, as well as some backsliding for the schemers. The relationships between men and women are universally sad, with a dominant driving force being "accommodation."

Wilson is an excellent writer, and it was a delight to read his historical slice of England, wry humor and all. I thought of the early days of the Internet, slow modem connections, the downloading of pictures, pixels at a time, first one rough pass, then another, finally the entire picture comes into sharper focus. Wilson writes in that fashion, a rough pass, a hint of something deeper, and then he returns over the events, and the picture deepens and intensifies.

Such novels are vital for the perspective they bring to the present, how some things truly are new, but mainly, much is repetition of the same human drama, with all its aspirations and flaws.

Early on in in "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes," a character is described as having an /affaire/. One wonders if this (1956) is the last time when an English author writing in English would have treated this discreet reference to indiscretion as a foreign word. Is it the concept that the English regarded as alien? Or is it merely a pathetic effort to bury it under a veil of respectability? Or a tacit acknowledgment that the French have more fun?

Whatever the answer, the italics are a delicate way of identifying this entertaining novel as a creature of its times. Indeed the action is dated (and the novel feels) a bit earlier-dating back the Atlee administration, when Britain was still reeling with exhaustion from World War II; when the socialists were busy trying to nationalize British industry, while the the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was busy trying to privatize Iranian oil.

Wilson makes it pretty clear that he intends to write a period piece from the very beginning: there is a cast list, and it runs to nearly two pages. For a novel of just 336 pages (in Penguin), this seems a bit much, and indeed quite a few of them are little more than sketches.

No, more than a period piece: Wilson wants to write a panorama of his time. This is an ambitious undertaking, and would be perilously easy for him to have fallen on his face. He has not quite achieved all he strove for, but perhaps remarkably, he hasn't really fallen on his face either. There isn't a lot of action, but there are some excellent character studies and a few good set pieces. There is some good comedy, but perhaps not quite as much as the author intended. Also of note: this must be about the first mainstream British novel to include explicitly gay characters (and not very nice ones, at that).

For comedy, Wilson is not Evelyn Waugh; for compulsive readability, he isn't quite Graham Greene. On the other hand, he isn't really striving to be either. He's himself: entertaining and rewarding, with nothing (much) for which to apologize.

The cover of the NYRB edition shows a Tenniel illustration to Lewis Carroll, from whom the title is taken. But though Angus Wilson's 1956 novel may be comedy, it is unusually complex and dark, and certainly neither fantasy nor farce. If anything, it is a morality play, with a large cast of characters listed at the start (including sections for those already dead and others only heard offstage). It is a dense and difficult book, with an exposition lasting almost half its length; only at that point does Wilson begin to pull the threads together, though he does so in increasingly satisfying ways.

The book opens with a (fictional) 1912 report from The Times about the excavation of the tomb of a seventh-century bishop at Melpham in East Anglia. Shockingly, the tomb also contained a priapic wooden figure, suggesting the mingling of early Christianity with paganism. Fast forward to the 1950s and to Professor Gerald Middleton, a distinguished historian, resting somewhat on former academic laurels and living on private means. Middleton, who was present at the Melpham discovery as an undergraduate, is now being asked to undertake the editorship of a important series of publications in British medieval history. He is curiously reluctant to accept, for reasons that will turn out to have a lot to do with the moral implications of that original excavation.

The most extended sections of the book deal with the academic world, with bitter rivalries between professors in a manner familiar from the works of C. P. Snow (and later David Lodge). But the abstract moral questions raised by Melpham soon become more personal, as issues resurface that make Middleton question his long-established loyalties. His battles with conscience are reflected in his dysfunctional family too, as we move forward to a Christmas party at the house of his estranged wife (one of Wilson's finer comic creations) and meet his two sons: Robin, a company manager, and John, a social activist and television pundit. In a series of flashbacks, we also learn more about Middleton's more or less open romance with a mistress, and see Robin repeating virtually the same pattern in his own marriage. As the circle of characters widens to include artists, do-gooders of various types, petty crooks, and even a rent boy, so the range of moral issues also increases to a bewildering degree, taking in not only questions of basic human decency, but also social matters specific to the British welfare state in the nineteen-fifties. I feel the moral thrust of the book is weakened by being aimed at too many targets.

Yes, Wilson does pull it all together, but his juggling becomes rather obvious. Yes, he paints on a broad social canvas, but his lower-class characters are less well realized than those from his own circle. His portrayal of the in-bred academic world is fun, but too hermetic for most tastes. All the same, he does create some memorable characters, and offers a time-capsule of an all-too-forgettable time in British life.

There's not a lot of raison d'etre for this very amusing comedy of British class life, centered upon a decades-long academic controversy, other than to show the consequences of conscience upon an elderly wealthy history professor. This book, which has been out of print for a few years in the US, is still quite enjoyable, and the cadre of curious characters that populate it are as memorable in their own way as those out of Dickens (to whom Wilson is often compared). There is a kind of creepiness in the latent homophobia of the comic ending (everyone receives his or her just desserts, which means in this case the major gay characters are killed or maimed), but the novel is of a different and earlier time.The description of Ingeborg Middleton's hideously frolicsome Nordic Christmas party alone makes the novel worth reading.

There seems to me to be a very good reason why this book was out of print before the New York Review resussitated it: to wit, it's very, very dated. Mr. Burgess must have made his remark about its being "one of the top five novels of the century" back when it was first published. Yes, the plot, such as it is, involves a sort of archeological hoax. But the novel is primarily a farcical comedy regarding the English classes and their uses of language in post WWII England-I think that this must be why Burgess, that linguistic connoiseur took a fancy to it.

It reads like an Austen novel with a bit of Wodehouse thrown in. But, these nuances that this book captures so well no longer exist, even for most of the English. And for Americans, the book must be a rather boring schlep of a novel indeed. How many of them know that when one "drawls" in England, one is taking a supercilious upper-class accent such as the "Oxford drawl"?-It is these minutiae that are so essential in "getting" the book that will leave many readers on either side of the pond in the year 2005 scratching their heads rather than chuckling, I fear.

3 stars for capturing the minutiae. But, essentially, this is a boook of ephemera, focusing on the inflections and manners of a bygone era.

There is something mysterious about this book. I don't know if it is the old english nature of the book or what but I really like this book.

John

Hmm...Interesting. This phrase was one I pronounced manytimes as I read this novel. Excluding of course the period duringwhich I was reading the first chapter and a half. I think the first hundred pages or so of this novel moved slower than a fat guy on a hot day. I mean come on, could we pick it up a little please! I understand now that all the information we learned about the characters in that first section was helpful, if not necessary, in better making sense of the novels events. But I don't think it needed to be that boring. It is however quite possible that there was a fair amount of luster that I missed in the first 100 pages or so pages because of the cultural, and language differences between my American understanding of language and humor, and that of the British. Which if the case I apologize to Mr. Wilson. Even if it is the cause though that I missed out on some pieces of the 1st sections puzzle, I think it was slow and could have used a bit more spice (maybe some explosions, some gratuitous sex and/or violence, even some drug abuse would have livened up the tone to an acceptable level).

But despite my feelings towards the first section I did find the rest of the book fairly interesting. I thought that Wilson did a spectacular job of giving insight into Gerald Middleton's depression and submissiveness through his daydreams during the Christmas visit with his family. But during my reading of their conversations during the Christmas diner I found myself making judgements about the characters which I had previously not felt comfortable making due to a lack of knowledge about them. I realized that I didn't really like them very much. I didn't like how Gerald dealt with his family. He was and a******! No wonder his kids grew up to be so pompous and condescending (excluding john who was pompous to but he did seem to have a good heart). Gerald never loved them, he treated them like they were his students; He didn't enjoy seeing them or talking to them, he was cold and unaffectionate, it was as if he treated being a father like a job. But this view I acquired of Gerald through his interactions between him and his children conflicted with the one I had previously held, one of sympathy.

Overall I thought this novel was interesting, but a bit misleading. I initially thought the novel was going to be a sad, morbid novel by the way it was introduced (in the middle of Gerald's depressed state). But by the way the characters are all connected, a fun, silly tone seems to be coming to the foreground.

I would recommend reading this novel, but only if you read it twice because now as I am writing a review of the novel I feel all of my thoughts about it changing. Which I think is the by-product of the novels fairly complex structure, but a structure which is definitely worth getting a little confused about in order to eventually find it's heart and soul.

1-Love