Customer Reviews

Less Than Angels (G K Hall Large Print Book Series)

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"Less Than Angels" is full of classic Pym characters: the eccentric, Alaric Lydgate, who sits in the evenings with an African mask on and wishes it were permissable to wear it out in public; Rhoda Wellcome and Mabel Swan, sisters, Rhoda given to peering at the neighbors from behind lace curtains; Catherine Oliphant, a writer and spinster, but with a twist she is living, unmarried with; Tom Mallow, one of many anthropologists in the story. Readers of "Excellent Women" will enjoy the reappearance of Esther Clovis and the references to Everard and Mildred Bone. The men in this story have more character development than in previous Pym novels. They are shown to be real people not so different form their feminine counterparts. There is competition in this story, a three-way competition for Tom Mallow's love, and a four-way competition for the Foresight grants, for the study of anthropolgy. The competitions mirror each other in subtle ways. Catherine is one of Pym's most endearing characters. You really yearn for her to find happiness. This is one of my favorites.

Barbara Pym has been compared to Jane Austen. I think that the similarities lie in the two authors' portrayal of characters.

In Austen's world, and a century later in Pym's, the women had comparatively little to do. They have lunch or dinner with friends, attend parties or volunteer at church. But even so, they have great amounts of time left over for introspection. Therein lies the beauty of both authors' stories. Who else could make such ordinary, uneventful lives seem interesting, even gripping?

Pym treats her characters with a gentle humor, making even their foibles seem genuinely endearing. While reading "Less Than Angels," I cared what happened to level headed Catherine and flighty Phoebe, two single women in love with the same man. Her characters are people I would like to know. Together we'd drink tea and have a pleasant chat, whiling away a rainy afternoon.

As usual, Pym has managed to achieve that peculiar sweet/sour tone which works so well in her novels. In Less Than Angels, a group of anthropologists find that competition on different levels leads them into new combinations of relationships and ideas. Whether it comes down to affairs of the heart or academic achievement, things are not as they seem and people have unexpected depths. Less Than Angels is particularly nice as it seems in large part to be about the ability of characters to change, even given the constrained and mannered world in which they live.

While reading, I enjoyed this book as much as I have enjoyed any Pym that I have read. However, I noticed when I sat down to write this review that it didn't stay with me as clearly or for as long as some of the others. If you haven't read Pym before, I would begin with The Sweet Dove Died or Excellent Women. These to are, to my mind, her best works. However, if you are already a fan of Pym, you will find nothing to disappoint you in Less Than Angels.

Besides being an author, Barbara Pym worked with the International African Institute in London, where she worked closely with anthropologists, who turn up with great frequency in her novels. In LESS THAN ANGELS she turns her attention almost completely over to a group of anthropology students and professors and their aides working at an unnamed university in London; the result is one of her very best novels, and certainly her funniest. As frequently happens with Pym's works, there is no clear protagonist in this work; almost everyone engages our sympathies but very differently. Most of the characters seem to be in orbit in one way or another around Tom Mallow, a charismatic son of privilege who has left his landed family to work on his dissertation, and Professor Felix Mainwaring, a distinguished anthropology professor who has managed to charm a wealthy widow into giving his department the promise of quite a lot of money. Most of the novel is superficially about the competition among various women in Tom's life for his romantic attentions, and that among the students to get one of the fellowships Professor Mainwaring dangles before them, but really it's a kind of anthropological study in itself of a very highly educated and polite group of people who seem on their way out as a dominant social force in London. (The novel is filled with references to its nineteenth-century antecedents in Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, and also shows us at odd moments the potential for the great social changes unleashed in London in the twentieth century in the form of non-European immigrants and of enthusiasts for alternative political ideologies such as international communism.)

Pym's exceptionally dry humor is quite evident throughout, and I genuinely laughed out loud at several sections (particularly at the weekend retreat Professor Mainwaring arranges for his fellowship applicants at his country estate, which has one of the funniest outcomes in fiction I can remember). What might be more subtle is the author's extraordinary craft at manipulating her characters and her situations. This is one of the most deftly constructed novels I've read in quite some time.

. . . with Eudora Welty, who said: "Barbara Pym * * * is a novelist to catch up with if you've been tardy to find her, like me. Her best ones * * * are sheer delight, and all of them companionable." I have now read three novels by Barbara Pym, and I will return for more.

Barbara Pym wrote her novels between 1950 and 1980. They are set in the United Kingdom, their characters come from the upper-middle class (though many are in straitened economic circumstances), the novels good-naturedly satirize many social conventions and practices of that class, and through them weaves a conspicuous but not strident feminist thread. The three that I have read are all gently humorous. The author whom Pym most reminds me of is Anthony Trollope. Others are reminded of Jane Austen, but having never read any Austen (an omission I hope to remedy) I cannot personally vouch for that comparison.

LESS THAN ANGELS (the phrase comes from Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man") revolves around a year of goings on at an anthropological research center in London - administrative heads kowtowing to rich donors, professors elbowing for recognition, anthropologists returned-from-the-field trying to overcome writer's block and write up their notes, and young students competing for limited grant money. At the same time, they all interact socially and some grope around for one sort or another of male-female pairing. Pym employs an ensemble cast of characters, but there is one character, Catherine Oliphant, who is a tad more important than the others. She is a writer rather than an anthropologist, though she cohabits with an anthropologist until he becomes infatuated with a 19-year-old student.

Some of the wry humor consists of reversing the telescope and turning the focus of anthropology not on African tribes but on English institutions. One character, when she attends a High Church service, cannot help but think that it was much more interesting from an anthropological standpoint than the religious ceremonies she studied in school. Another realizes that a Belgravia debutante ball is equally worthy of anthropological analysis as any native African ritual. "For really, when one came to consider it, what could be more primitive than the rigid ceremonial of launching a debutante on the marriage market?" But some of Pym's offhand social commentary is more universal in nature. For example, as Catherine Oliphant ascends the worn linoleum-covered stairs to her flat over a newsagent's shop, she felt "that she was worthy of a more gracious setting, but then there are few of us who do not occasionally set a higher value on ourselves than Fate has done."

LESS THAN ANGELS is a little less than great literature, but it is refined, civilized, and quite pleasurable - "companionable", to borrow an apt word from Eudora Welty.

another british day time soap opera. but i do NOT mean to underrate Pym as an author! i think she is a wonderful writer and i LOVE her novels. I have read every one. more interesting than a tv movie, but really isn't this just sophisticated beach reading? very good escapism, 1940s, 1950s England.

Barbara Pym is an underappreciated author--a modern Jane Austen. This book, like her others, is lots of fun.