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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
VIEW FROM OLYMPUS,
By DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Sweets of Pimlico (Paperback)
Whenever I have heard him on the airwaves, A N Wilson has always adopted a rather lofty and superior tone. I was therefore curious to see whether he had anything to be superior about in his own work, and I have to concede that to some extent he has. This is his first novel, set mainly in London but partly in Brighton during the height of the IRA bombings in the late 70's. For anyone unfamiliar with London, Pimlico is an upmarket region on the north bank of the Thames, and the `Fish Square' where much of the action takes place is obviously Dolphin Square, an expensive condominium of which I have some small experience as a visitor.
It would be impossible to reproach The Sweets of Pimlico for predictability. The story centres round a young woman teacher of mathematics, the daughter of a retired diplomat. What changes her life is a chance encounter with an elderly German aristocrat who is, it turns out, known to the rest of her family for a variety of reasons. The story that develops from there on has real originality. How `realistic' the scenarios are was not something that I asked myself to any great extent as I read, because the considerations that arise are not the sole property of the named players. Love receives a very cold-eyed appraisal, in particular where money comes into the matter. You would not expect to find many novels these days that lacked sexual themes nor is this any such novel, but the interesting aspect to me was how uncertain, indeed possibly non-existent, was the sexual dimension to the lives of some of the most important characters. One would also have expected a nonchalant and you-can't-shock-me treatment from Wilson of the varied sexual proclivities of those of his characters who have any ascertained sexual proclivities at all. This expectation is fulfilled, but while the general tone does not resemble, say, Simon Raven, I was still startled by the offhanded casualness of the incest theme, something I had always thought of as one of the great remaining taboos. There is a good deal of high-quality humour, and the condescending tone that Wilson carries around with him makes this more and not less effective, I seemed to find. Sometimes the snobbery is quite explicit, as in the revelation that the despised vicar had come from Southend. At other times it is more subtle, as in the episode of the misaddressed letters and the way the heroine's genteel parents react to what they have just read. Best of all, perhaps, is the unmistakable parody of a Whitehall farce when the heroine's flat is visited fortuitously and all together by a string of parties who have been carefully trying to avoid one another. The great leveller is of course death, and here Wilson rises to real dignity and gravity in his tale, without however losing grip on his cynicism. Love or death, they happen to human beings, and human beings do not stop being the way the Creator made them, whatever happens. The whole tale is a fine harlequinade, acted out on a stage of comparative wealth by a cast of the moderately privileged. The ironic and perhaps unworthy question occurred to me - in this context of Lady Tradescant, Baron Dietrich Gormann and a few others, how did the author feel about being born into this cruel world as Andrew Wilson? It seems to me that we should probably think of him as really a Wylson.
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