Angus Wilson is brave. He also wrote this hilariously cynical book involving a wealthy family and its many branches and connections, all of them involved in lies. ( )

Wilson's second novel brings together a large, complicated cast of multiply-interconnected characters (so complicated that he apparently felt it necessary to include a dramatis personae before Chapter One), with at their centre the middle-aged, middlingly successful, medievalist, Professor Gerald Middleton.

Forty years ago, on the eve of the Great War, Middleton's teacher, the late Professor Stokesay, had made a sensational find in the Suffolk tomb of an Anglo-Saxon bishop. Once seen as an isolated freak, new archaeological work on Heligoland (!) is now starting to persuade scholars that Stokesay's discovery might be part of a significant pattern. Middleton has reason to suspect that the pagan idol found in the bishop's tomb was planted there as a twisted practical joke by Stokesay's son, since killed in the war, but has never felt it appropriate to cause trouble by saying anything. Should he do so now?

At the same time, Middleton finds himself in possession of various confidences relating to his own family, with similar dilemmas attached to them...

A darkly-funny, morally-complex tale, with no real daylight at the end of it, but a lot of entertaining little jabs at the scholarly world and its eccentricities, and insights into 1950s English (bourgeois) society. Plenty of gay characters, but they are still mostly pushed into obscure corners of the plot and their lives are made to seem furtive and shady to the remaining characters: this isn't the brave new world of Mrs Eliot. Not quite yet, anyway. ( )

An awfully good book, held back to 4 stars because I wasn't emotionally engaged (when compared to the somewhat similar John Irving, Charles Dickens, or Robertson Davies--it's that kind of book). A very large cast (dauntingly large at first, but eventually you work out that everyone knows everyone else, and what those relationships are, and the book narrows its focus to a particular person/family and you realise who are the leads and who are the supports).

Not as funny as I was expecting--really, not funny at all, or at least not in the way where I would tell others "it's so funny!" because it's not. It's a slightly satiric soap-opera. I was particularly surprised by the openness with which characters' homosexuality, adultery, etc., was dealt with (I suppose books from the time period aren't necessarily as chaste as the movies/tv from then!) so that's also a mark in its favour. ( )

Unfortunately, I think you'd have to be pretty well versed in mid-20th century English academic and political culture to catch all that Wilson put into this lampoon. It's not on the surface silly, but you know jokes are being set up. The writing is fine, but the subject gets tedious if you're not in on the jokes. ( )

An archaeological fraud has repercussions through three generations.