Volume 4, Number 2 · February 25, 1965
A New Angus Wilson
By Bernard Bergonzi
Late Call
by Angus Wilson
Viking, 316 pp., $4.95
Angus Wilson has always been a paradoxical writer, assiduously concerned with the niceties of humanist behavior, but naggingly interested in the cruel and the sinister. This was very evident in his early short stories—such as the notorious 'Strawberry Jam'—and fairly implicit in his novels. When The Old Men at the Zoo appeared four years ago it was admired by some readers, but others, including this one, found it a dismaying work. In it Mr. Wilson abandoned his natural talents for a portentous essay in fantastic allegory, culminating in a phantasmagoria of violence—with England at war with the Common Market countries and political prisoners sacrificed to the animals of the London Zoo in an attempted revival of the gladiatorial shows of Imperial Rome. Its obsessive quality suggested that it was the kind of novel that every now and then a writer feels he has to write, but this didn't make it any more of a success. One now sees, however, that it was something of a necessary blood-letting for Mr. Wilson's imagination: he faced his own inner fantasies with clarity and courage and, for the time being at least, subdued them. As a result, his new novel seems to me to have a serenity and a concentration on its subject, without the deflections that indicate the pressure of the author's hidden private concerns, that is new in Mr. Wilson's fiction and indicates a large development in his talents.
Review, 1909 words
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