This particular reviewer rarely writes a negative review. If he didn’t contact me, there’s no need to assume he won’t contact you. A positive review has to focus on what was communicated, while a negative review has to live on what was not felt, and that list is endlessly long, so where do you start? “I liked” or “I didn’t like it” say nothing about the work in question, only about the reviewer, and this unknown person, often hidden behind an alias, should never be at the center of the review.
So when it comes to Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, why should he start with “I didn’t like it”? Well, at least get the opinion out of the way, because in the case of this particular book, it has to be said. Anglo Saxon Attitudes felt like the longest book I’ve ever read. It wasn’t, but it felt that way for most of its duration. But the reason for my opinion is complex, and as I suggested earlier, it has more to do with me than with the job.
Details of the book’s plot are available elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the important element is the fraudulent planting of a pagan erotic sculpture in the tomb of a medieval Anglo-Saxon bishop that was excavated decades ago. The apparent authenticity of the find had to be catalogued, described, interpreted. For half a century this practical joke at least influenced thinking, at least among interested academics, about the cultural and religious origins of the race that now inhabits the country we now call England. Hence the book’s title, rooted both in the historical relics of the Anglo-Saxons, for whom “England” would have been an unknown label, and modern Britons, for whom both the concept of “Anglo-Saxon” and “England” are both myths reconstructed.
Amid the need to keep the myth of national identity and culture alive, a certain person who was involved in the original discovery discovers that he must continue to perpetuate the lie. He has personal and professional reasons. He might as well even believe that it was true. To some degree, he built his career on the existence of the find, and equally, he built half of his life on dating the girlfriend of the person who played the original prank on his father by planting the object in the grave and then claiming its authenticity. . The decades have come and gone. Lives have been lived. Relationships have been severed, remade, and broken by death and estrangement. Gerald, who knows the truth about various things, has lived with the hoax, but dismissed it as possibly false, given the character of the person he admitted to pulling it off. Gerald has now decided that it is time to come clean and tell the story.
But who should I tell? And how? Reputations are at stake. The water under the bridge will not flow to the other side. People have moved on. Or do they have? Anglo Saxon Attitudes thus inhabits a society with what could be described as a rarefied atmosphere. These people belong to a certain social class, attend gentlemen’s clubs, and for whatever reason regularly resort to French when English isn’t good enough. A single paragraph of thoughts could refer explicitly but opaquely to five or six of the book’s characters, any one of whom could have been encountered during the fifty-year span of these memories. To anyone living outside the Donnish society of public school, Oxbridge or academia, these people are barely recognizable as English, as archaeological, perhaps, as something excavated long, long ago. And yet they are the mouthpieces through which concepts of contemporary identity and culture are extensively examined.
One thread that figures vividly in the mind of each character, if not explicitly in the English culture under examination, is sex. The erotic nature of the apparently pagan idol in the Anglo-Saxon tomb places a large ellipsis after each mention of the word sex in the book. We have characters who are openly gay in a society that has laws against the practice. We meet respectable men who give themselves a little life and women who express their desires through euphemisms. And also some that don’t. And there is much more besides. Maybe too much. Maybe… For this reader…
Anglo Saxon Attitudes is a complex and ambitious novel. For this reviewer, it falls short of all its implied goals because it focuses too much on a narrow and unrepresentative section of the nation, consistently patronizes working-class attitudes, and features characters who spend most of their time living out myths. Maybe that was the point… Maybe… Why don’t you read it and see what you think?
