Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

This particular reviewer rarely writes a negative review. If you have not contacted me, there is no need to assume that you will not be contacted. 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, indeed, “I didn’t like it” says nothing about the job 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 Anglo-Saxon attitudes of Angus Wilson, why should it start with “I didn’t like it”? Well, at least it gets opinion out of the way, because in the case of this particular book, it needs 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 cataloged, described, interpreted. For half a century, this practical joke 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 book’s title, 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. reconstructed myths.

Amid the need to keep alive the myth of national identity and culture, a certain person who participated in the original discovery discovers that he must continue to perpetuate the lie. You have personal and professional reasons. You might also believe it was true. To some extent, he has built his career on the existence of the find and, likewise, he built half his life by living with 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. Decades have passed. Lives have been lived. Relationships have been broken, remade, and broken by death and estrangement. Gerald, who knows the truth about several things, has lived with the deception, but dismissed it as possibly false, given the character of the person who admitted to having performed it. Gerald has now decided that it is time to open up 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 have they? 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 switch to French when English is not good enough. A single paragraph of the thoughts may explicitly but opaquely refer to five or six of the characters in the book, any of whom could have been encountered during the fifty-year duration of these memories. To anyone living outside of the public school, Oxbridge, or academy limited company, these people are barely recognizable as English, as archaeological perhaps, as something unearthed a long, long time ago. And yet they are the spokespersons through which contemporary concepts of identity and culture are carefully examined.

One aspect that figures vividly in each character’s mind, 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 homosexual in a society that has laws against the practice. We meet respectable men who indulge a bit and women who express their wishes in euphemisms. And also some that don’t. And there is much more besides. Maybe too much. Perhaps … For this reader …

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is a complex and ambitious novel. For this critic, it does not achieve all its implicit objectives because it concentrates too much on a narrow and unrepresentative section of the nation, it was always condescending to the attitudes of the working class and presented characters who spent most of their time living myths. Maybe that was the point … Maybe … Why not read it and see what you think?