Word: saxonism
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...ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES (410 pp.)-Angus Wilson-Viking...
Angus Wilson is a social satirist with an itchy trigger finger. The novel is his shooting gallery, and the characters he sets up as targets not only have clay feet but clay minds and clay hearts as well. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is his longest, cleverest and most annihilating display of literary marksmanship to date, and after it is all over, what hangs in the air is the acrid odor of an unrelenting misanthropy...
...Joke on Tame Cats. The theme of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is fraud leavened with a little Freud. In particular, it is the kind of fraud practiced by the English, who cling to the belief that if something awkward is ignored, it will go away. Gerald Middleton, handsome, sixtyish and a kind of historian emeritus among English medievalists, has long repressed a suspicion that the 1912 discovery of the Melpham Tomb was a grandiose hoax on a par with Piltdown Man. The remains of a 7th century Christian bishop named Eorpwald had been found in the tomb. But in the coffin...
...poisoned his family life. Author Wilson takes his hero on a kind of infernal journey through the circles of deceit in the world-infidelity, envy, avarice, false pride, false piety, malice-before Gerald can face up to the truth about Melpham and himself. The journey is complicated, since Anglo-Saxon Attitudes has as many characters and flashbacks as a deck has cards, and Author Wilson shuffles, reshuffles and deals them in endlessly changing combinations...
...mountains and red-clay hills to its plains and coast. Cities outpace the struggling counties, the Negro vote leaps upward, cattle are becoming more valuable than cotton, industry outproduces the farmer, even Republicans are running candidates. Against this gathering avalanche Herman intends to maintain the Bible-shouting, "Anglo-Saxon," segregated status quo he has always enjoyed. He believes firmly that he can halt the pulsing pistons of political progress. He believes because, reared on politics, he has found that the processes of Georgia government can be manipulated to achieve the things the Talmadges want and that old Georgia wants...