Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

By Angus Wilson
Introduction by Jane Smiley

Gerald Middleton is a sixty-year-old self-proclaimed failure. Worse than that, he’s "a failure with a conscience." As a young man, he was involved in an archaeological dig that turned up an obscene idol in the coffin of a seventh-century bishop and scandalized a generation. The discovery was in fact the most outrageous archaeological hoax of the century, and Gerald has long known who was responsible and why. But to reveal the truth is to risk destroying the world of cozy compromises that, personally as well as professionally, he has long made his own.

One of England's first openly gay novelists, Angus Wilson was a dirty realist who relished the sleaze and scuffle of daily life. Slashingly satirical, virtuosically plotted, and displaying Dickensian humor and nerve, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes features a vivid cast of characters that includes scheming academics and fading actresses, big businessmen toggling between mistresses and wives, media celebrities, hustlers, transvestites, blackmailers, toadies, and even one holy fool. Everyone, it seems, is either in cahoots or in the dark, even as comically intrepid Gerald Middleton struggles to maintain some dignity while digging up a history of lies.

Reviews

Angus Wilson is without question one of the most important British novelists writing today, and some would say the greatest. . . . Farcical, serious, malicious, compassionate—in short, a novelist for all seasons.
— Margaret Drabble

[Wilson] writers better about the psycho-dynamics of family life than any other writer of his generation, perhaps better than any other English writer. He writes well about Englishness, that difficult, embarrassing and currently interesting topic. He is essentially a comic writer, who can marry what is comic to what is painful and deeply serious: Dostoevsky is his mentor.
— Peter Conradi, Angus Wilson

[Wilson is] the most developed and impressive novel-writer of his generation.
— Ray Bradbury

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is a book one can take fiendish great pleasure in reading.
— William Bittner, The Nation

Covering four decades of English social life, touching every level from those of political and spiritual leader to that of the criminal, exploring every mood from that of a high comedy to that of bitter melodrama, Wilson’s book seems to me to be as bodly conceived and as deftly execusted as any novel of the great tradition.
— James Gray, Saturday Review

Few novelists on either side of the Atlantic have anything like Mr. Wilson's range. His men and women take hold of the imagination as very few characters can do in fiction today, for in their very human imperfection lies the secret of life.
— Sylvia Stallings, New York Herald Tribune

One of the five greatest novels of the century.
— Anthony Burgess

After Evelyn Waugh, what? The answer is Angus Wilson, a master of mimicry, diction, intention and wit.
— Edmund Wilson

Angus Wilson has leaped with astonishing speed into the front rank of contemporary English novelists, and one has only to read his new book, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes to see why. . . .[In this] immensely entertaining volume are to be found in abundance the virtues that so much recent English fiction has lacked . . . energy, observation, inventiveness, conviction . . .
— Brendan Gill, The New Yorker

In every generation one or two novelists raise the conventional picture of the English character. Mr. Wilson does this.
— V.S. Pritchett, New Statesman

Also see:

Improbable Heroes & Heroines Collection The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, The Slaves of Solitude, and Lolly Willowes

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