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TIME: Almanac 1993
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TIME Almanac 1993.iso
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021092
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0210471.000
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1992-08-28
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BOOKS, Page 73Mortal Fools
DAUGHTERS OF ALBION
By A.N. Wilson
Viking; 287 pages; $21
In the past 15 years, Britain's A.N. Wilson has built a
formidable reputation as a prolific man of letters -- 11 novels,
three biographies, essays, journalism. He is brilliant, brisk,
funny and morally exacting. Daughters of Albion is the last
volume of a trilogy produced, with the author's characteristic
vigor, a book a year.
One suspects that a considerable understanding of the
British intelligentsia is necessary for a true appreciation of
these works. Just reading Iris Murdoch will not do. The story
involves the Lampitt family, a large clan whose money springs
from 18th century alehouses. "They're not really aristocrats,"
a character observes, "they're the intellectual aristocracy of
England . . . one of the best things this country has ever
produced."
Well, pity England. The Lampitts tend to be woolly
leftists cultivating small gardens of scholarship and politics
and dandling hangers-on like Julian Ramsay, the diffident
narrator of all three books. In the first, Incline Our Hearts,
Ramsay is a young man full of bright promise. In the second, A
Bottle in the Smoke, reality, in the form of diminished hopes
and a doomed marriage, sets in. By Daughters of Albion he is
contemplating a book on -- guess who? -- the Lampitts.
Roiling these backwaters are two powerful, charismatic
figures, Raphael Hunter, an outright scoundrel, and Albion Pugh,
who is more of a chronic liar and gifted fabulist. Both men are
effortlessly successful with women: Ramsay loses his wife to
Hunter and a beloved cousin to Pugh. He envies Pugh's "capacity
to mythologise existence . . . his charm and his whatever it was
he had instead of genius."
It is a poignant confession of rue, and Ramsay would
appear to be a classic sensitive narrator. But Wilson is up to
something more, which gives the book considerable strength. Near
the end, Ramsay betrays his best friend to, of all people,
Raphael Hunter, with serious consequences. No one in the large
cast escapes the author's stern moral gaze. Ramsay is last seen
scheming, probably bootlessly, to pursue the latest young woman
to fall in love with Albion Pugh.
By Martha Duffy