Anglo-Saxon Platitudes

LATE CALL by Angus Wilson. 316 pages. Viking. $4.95.

In case of dire need, when characters fail to move and ideas remain hopelessly mired, many an author falls back on a reliable device. He hauls his characters (and the reader) into church, and there, cloaked in clerical robes, delivers a sermon that sets everybody straight on what the novel is about. By extraordinary coincidence, literary sermons are always marvelously germane: no hero-wretch taken in adultery is ever made to sit through a discourse on the nature of the Holy Ghost.

In the case of Angus Wilson's latest novel, the need is dire indeed. Its characters and their predicaments are sharply observed, but there seems no very good reason for observing them. Wilson's heroine is a lower-middle-class Englishwoman named Sylvia Calvert who at 65 retires as a manageress of a seaside hotel and goes with her reprobate husband to live with their widowed son. The son is a braying ass who busies himself with the affairs of his community, one of Britain's scientifically planned New Towns. He has a snobbish daughter and two sons, one a homosexual and the other a ban-the-bomber. A great deal of space is devoted to demonstrating that these people are what they are.

Sylvia tries to help during family collisions but is rebuffed. She feels sorry and confused and so does the reader. Then, with nearly 200 pages turned, comes the sermon. It is a fine sermon, delivered by a wise old Scots preacher. on the folly of hoping to win God's grace by heaping up worldly goods or worldly good works. "Aye, Annie," the preacher mimics, "I've been aye doing so muckle guid, I've noe had time to set me down and mind who I am."

The modern reader is attuned instantly; a search for identity is in progress. But it is a disappointing search. Sylvia's identity is not very interesting, even to herself. Another hundred pages of collisions and rebuffs is got through before Sylvia (her identity evidently found) shrugs and decides to move out. The reader feels like giving a cheer.

The author of the memorable satire, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, has bound up the parts of a novel in an orderly flow of narrative. But this is not the same as writing a novel.

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