His structural method is, as often as not, to follow his nose. Things are too interesting to be left alone. Some digressions blossom into half-chapters. Others are shrugged aside. Where are Auden and all the ‘pylon pitworks pansy poets’? He roams, suiting himself, from music and the plastic arts through philosophy and high politics, though he skims over the more boring aspects of the latter (compare the heavy sausage of Roy Hattersley’s The Edwardians), and ignores sport entirely, barely according the 1936 Olympics a passing mention.
Peculiar and intriguing connections are made, some of them a bit barmy. Roosevelt and Churchill are compared in detail to Laurel and Hardy. Henry James is set alongside Woodrow Wilson. At one point Bentham, Dickens and Malthus appear together in a single parenthesis. At another, a discussion of the rise in popularity of crossword puzzles moves seamlessly into the rise of fascism.
‘The passion for opinions,’ writes Wilson, ‘will strike us as one of the great curses of the 20th century.’ Here, amid one of the most opinionated books you could imagine, you can practically hear him laughing. Wilson’s own opinions and provocations are what make this book — from his observations about the characteristics of ‘power-obsessed females’ to his bizarre affection for Dr Crippen.
It’s customary when reviewing this type of work to include a sonorous paragraph opening with a phrase like ‘Nevertheless, Wilson’s account of the period is not without its errors and omissions.’ More learned reviewers than I have taken issue with points of fact and emphasis, large and small, in this book. I’ll presume to pick just one nit: Giro, the dead Alsatian buried in Waterloo Place, belonged not to Joachim von Ribbentrop, but to his predecessor, the last Weimar ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch.
The virtues of this vigorous, lively and winningly eccentric work of synthesis and argumentation aren’t in what it can tell you about dead dogs; they are in what it can tell you about the feel of the first half of the 20th century as filtered through the distinctive sensibility of A. N. Wilson. If, like me, you regard him as an ornament to the world of letters, you’ll be more than entertained by After the Victorians.
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