September 1961
Mr. Wilson’s new novel is set in 1970 at the London Zoo. The narrator of the story is Simon Carter, ex-Treasury, and now the Zoo’s Secretary; married to a rich and charming young American and with two children. He is a naturalist with a great love for badgers (who as we know, take a deal of watching if one is to see anything of them), and has therefore some informed interest in the Society he serves. His life, like so many others when viewed in these general terms, seems to be both pleasant and stimulating. In fact, or life - and this novel is a most faithfully brilliant exposition of that transient quantity - Carter is beset by the warp and woof of loyalty and conscience: on the one hand, he has the Director, Leacock, over sixty, and relaxing into euphoric generalities the practice of which - at their best - involve everybody else in unnecessarily hard work; on the other, there is Sir Robert Falcon, Curator of Mammals, and number two in the Society, who has a belligerently nostalgic passion for maintaining and substantiating the old Zoo architecture and ways.
Carter, wedged between these two with the responsibility of reconciling and administrating their enthusiasms, has also to deal with them against a background of intermittent international crises. These bring about the realisation of Leacock’s dream - a vast National Park in which all fauna can be seen at ‘limited liberty’ - which is aided by the Zoo’s President, a powerful old cynic who owns a lot of newspapers and dabbles forcefully in politics. The National Park is established, and then, when it has served its purpose, abandoned. Leacock is out, and Falcon in. Further crises lead to war, and Carter witnesses Falcon’s collapse, and outside and beyond it, the collapse of the world round him. The book ends after the war and its immediate consequences are over, with Carter, who has in a sense lost everything through his painstaking loyalty to idea rather than people and through his adherence to the interest of the Society, applying for the Directorship of it.
Here is the kind of novel that is immensely enjoyable at the time of reading, and that strikes one afterwards with all kinds of excellent intricacies. Mr. Wilson has a genius for implication: he has also this time produced a structure that exactly contains another structure with no space wasted, this process continuing as far as the mind cares to pursue it. These qualities of internal balances and fittingness are a hallmark of the satisfying novel; a chief reason for making one want to re-read, because there is more to discover than one apprehends at first sight. Mr. Carter seems to me to suffer a little too much from chronic disgust at his own species to be a really happy administrator in any circumstances, and his relationship with his wife is not quite round enough to stand the passage of a book, but neither of these criticism spoil a work beautifully composed of interest and entertainment (the description of a television programme, for example is a superb instance of the latter without being simply a tangent to Mr. Wilson’s theme) and the whole work is written throughout in the author’s top gear.