Animal Crackers

THE OLD MEN AT THE ZOO (352 pp.)--Angus Wilson--Viking ($4.50).

When a writer not known to have been guilty of science fiction sets his novel in the 1970s, the reader knows that a message is coming, probably on wings of allegory. British Novelist Angus Wilson, who has until now been content to annotate skillfully the thesis that people are unbelievably nasty (Anglo-Saxon Attitudes), sets the time of his new novel halfway between now and 1984, and the place is the London Zoo. Only a Symbol Simon could fail to read a message here.

But, oddly enough, the harder one looks, the blurrier the words become, as in those diplomas by Cartoonist Saul Steinberg. The first third of the book concerns the pother that arises when a sick giraffe kicks a keeper to death and, in the process, as is obligatory these days in symbolic works, emasculates him. In the book's second third, the irascible old men who run the zoo squabble violently over a plan to transport the animals to a game preserve on the Welsh border. But the energy of their manias is fussed away to little effect, for in the final chapters, rather irrelevantly, there is a war. Using conventional weapons (the U.S. and Russia have jointly threatened to obliterate any nation using atomic bombs), the countries of Europe overrun England. The book ends with the coming of peace and the kind of normality in which things get worse.

If the protagonist, a priggish young zoo administrator, is not of much interest, the quarrelsome old curators are a fine pride of toothless lions. The dialogue sounds just like human speech, and the novel has violence, sodomy and even a little humor. The book leads nowhere on its own, and as satire it lacks a discoverable satiree. One British critic suggested somewhat desperately that Wilson is discussing the European Common Market, but significantly he did not say whether he thinks the author thinks that the Common Market is good or bad. In the end, the only message that comes through is Wilson's old bassoon theme: people are extraordinarily nasty.

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