Mr. Colin Wilson Among the Bores Of Bohemia

THE standards of excellence of modern English light fiction--comfortable clarity and generous wit--are, like Shakespeare's standards, centered in that purest of human pleasures, a garden, this one the size of shire, and tended until her recent death by the softly malicious and completely delightful Angela Thirkell. Those writers intelligent enough to acknowledge Mrs. Thirkell's leadership (like Nevil Shute and 'Miss Read') have always enjoyed the quiet success their sound judgment deserved; those rebellious Angries (like John Braine, John Wain and that lot) who have ignored her example have inevitably become eminently unreadable. Their prose becomes barren, sluggish and didactic; their characters tedious; and their plots angular or absurd.

Mr. Colin Wilson, who inaugurated his own peculiarly notable career with but a single succes d'estime, has now tried his hand at the light novel. And he has chosen to cast his lot with the unfortunate and tiresome Angries. No longer the precocious collater of quips and cranks, Mr. Wilson now seeks to chronicle the Soho adventures of an ingenu wanderer with little money and less intelligence. The adventures include a noisy actor, a shabby count, a fiery painter (who seems to be some sort of salvation figure) and a pretty girl (who couldn't really save anybody from anything).

Clearly, Mr. Wilson does not approve of his seedy characters and their restless travels. But having decided to write as an Angry, he has deserted detachment and abandoned the garden; as a result, of course, his book is as wearisome as his characters. The actor, who mouthes a Bohemain credo, is particularly trying, and one is required to read so many pages of his awful shoutings: "They're [presumably the untroubled middle classes] all hypocrites and frauds. They spend their money so they can buy television sets and washing machines, but the one thing they can't buy is human dignity, because a slave can't have dignity...." (The rest of it isn't a bit better.)

The book is, in fact, rather upsetting. Mr. Wilson has in him the wit of a Kingsley Amis and the erudition of a Dorothy L. Sayers, but he will insist on writing by the standards of the bracken. He is, indeed, in danger of choking off these talents altogether; and that, of course, would be no small misfortunte.