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 infinitely long, so where do you start? “I liked it” 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 I start with “I didn’t like it”? Well, at least it gets 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 before, it has more to do with me than with work.
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 an Anglo-Saxon bishop from the Middle Ages that was excavated decades ago. The apparent authenticity of the find had to be catalogued, described, interpreted. For half a century this practical joke has at least influenced thinking, at least among interested scholars, about the cultural and religious origins of the race that now inhabits the country we now call England. Hence the title of the book, rooted both in the historical relics of the Anglo-Saxons, for whom “England” would have been an unfamiliar label, and modern Britons, for whom both the concept of “Anglo-Saxon” and “England” are both myths reconstructed.
In the midst of the need to keep alive the myth of national identity and culture, 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 an extent, he built his career on the existence of the find, and likewise built half his life by hooking up with the girlfriend of the person who played the original prank on his father by planting the item 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 a number of things, has lived with the deception, 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 you 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 some reason regularly fall back on French when English isn’t good enough. A single paragraph of thoughts could explicitly but opaquely refer to five or six of the book’s characters, any one of whom could have been encountered during the fifty-year span of these recollections. To anyone living outside the Donnish society of public school, Oxbridge or academia, these people are barely recognizable as English, as archaeologists 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 each character’s mind, if not explicitly in the English culture being examined, is sex. The erotic nature of the apparently pagan idol in the Anglo-Saxon tomb places a large ellipsis after every 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 who 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 of its implied goals because it focuses too much on a narrow and unrepresentative section of the nation, was consistently patronizing of working-class attitudes, and featured characters who spent most of their time living out myths. Maybe that was the point… Maybe… Why don’t you read it and see what you think?