Wilson's Zoo Story: Savage Disgust, Brilliant Parody

Because Mr. Angus Wilson is, among many other things, an acute chronicler of the Welfare State, he has incurred the unfortunate label of "traditional novelist"--the nastiest epithet in the current critical lexicon. Mr. Wilson's novels are by this means arbitrarily damned to comparisons with the matronly, jovial and encyclopaedic shades (respectively) of George Eliot, Charles Dickens and John Galsworthy.

Genial company, these assiduous scribblers, but also cloying. For these three novelists are remembered with increasing frequency not for the devastating brilliance of the center of their social vision, but for the treacly smearings around the edges. (Who, for instance can remember Mr. Casaubon, but who can ever forget Dorothea or Will Ladislaw?) Mr. Wilson's own vision is unfailingly clear, his thought unswervingly honest, two facts which make him the most important writer in Britain today. Yet--obscured by his proclaimed Olympian associations--his first three novels have brought him the lukewarm and standardized praise dished out to Trollopian retreads like the late Mrs. Angela Thirkell.

Perhaps the frustrations of a misguided critical appraisal are the reason for Mr. Wilson's new and singularly disturbing novel, The Old Men at the Zoo. What Mr. Wilson has now published is a book that is at once grotesquely savage, brutally satiric, and impersonally destructive of the whole fabric of English society.

The object of Mr. Wilson's venom is the still unfinished sequence of novels by C.P. Snow, provisionally entitled Strangers and Mothers. The first chapter of The Old Men at the Zoo is, in fact, simply a brilliant parody of Sir Charles' eight Lewis Eliot novels; Simon Carter, the narrator Mr. Wilson has devised, is a monstrous amalgam of the smug, self-conscious, self-mocking cadence and mechanical bleakness of thought peculiar to Eliot.

And, like Eliot, Carter finds himself engaged in a bitter struggle for power between his several bosses, seeks sexual relief from the strains of his work in the arms of a highly unstable wife, admits to ambitions, and is young and cautiously well thought of. He likes to believe he is the "conscience" of his set.

Unlike Eliot's, Simon Carter's world is inately ludicrous. He is a party to a power struggle between two stock Snow characters, Edwin Leacock (the "ambitious scientist-administrator," confident of imminent success, armed for battle with "bonhomie and grin" and "four-square honesty") and his deputy Robert Falcon (old friend of Carter's, the right sort of person, arrogant, dandyish, famous soldier-explorer, with a head like a ravaged handsome Apollo"). But the struggle is not for control of a ministry or even of an industry, but for the right to guide the destinies of the London Zoo in the 1970's. All the intense decisions and rivalries are ultimately absurd.

And more than absurd, they are bestial and very evil. The crucial incident of the first chapter (Snow's novels abound in crucial incidents) is not a hasty or disastrous slip of the tongue, as it is the gruesome death of a young assistant keeper who is crushed to death by a diseased giraffe. For the Zoo's leaders, however, death has only a Snowbound political significance: Falcon, the Curator of Mammals, is directly responsible for the killing, but Leacock, the Director, decides not to mention the incident to him because in his own campaign for a "National Zoological Reserve' he must have Falcon's support, and "cannot afford the slightest appearance of vindictiveness against a man like that."

But Carter's disgust turns quickly to sadistic pleasure in suffering: he becomes "infected with hysteria" at the "wildly funny" thought of being "kicked in the balls by a giraffe!" The whole appealing incident is, for him, a "good, dirty joke." Later, he is goaded by his wife into promising some sort of corrective action, but even at that point his only real concern is that "any carelessness...must be brought home to the offender."

No one survives that chapter with any honor; everyone in Mr. Wilson's new and very Waughspish world is damned and inhuman.

SO MUCH for the first chapter. In his nightmare inversion of C.P. Snow, Mr. Wilson has exposed the inadequacy of the decent man in a struggle for power, the moral bankruptcy of the struggle itself, and has even suggested that every such struggle may be inherently absurd. He has also written a magnificently sustained, if harsh, parody of Snow's novels. World he had left is at that.

But Mr. Wilson is now immutably wedded to novel length writing, and his 80-pagem parody grows into a tiresome, nasty, repetitive 352-page expose. for Mr. Wilson has little else to say in his extra 272-pages. That Carter is immoral is abundantly evident in the first chapter; that his world is doomed to swift collapse is equally apparent. And yet Mr. Wilson feels compelled to narrate the events that reveal Carter as a bounder, and that bring about the final disintegration of all the bloated, macabre Curators.

Mr. Wilson is preoccupied by his sick fantasy, as he had previously been by sexual aberration (homosexuality is a major theme in each of his first three novels). One would like to think, as I suggested earlier, that this new novel was prompted by a need to escape the traditionalist critical niche. And yet it may well be that the violent disgust with modern Britain (he is disgusted, mind you, not angry) that Mr. Wilson expresses in The Old Men at the Zoo is entirely genuine, and not just a calculated shock to England's Aunt Ednas. If so, Mr. Wilson's usefulness as a social observer and his excellence as a novelist may be at an end: disgust disintegrates plot, characters and style even as it warps social vision.

These dismal speculations can be resolved, of course, only with the appearance of Mr. Wilson's next novel. It is to be hoped that his spasm of anger will have passed. But until his next book is finished one must worry.