Word: wilson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Wilson...
...Britain's young literary lions, Andrew Norman Wilson, 38, has been busiest at marking his territory. Since the mid-1970s he has published eleven satiric novels, plus biographies of John Milton, Sir Walter Scott, Hilaire Belloc, and last year's much and justly praised Tolstoy. In addition, Wilson has written about Christian theology and religious affairs (How Can We Know?; The Church in Crisis...
...this diverse plenty a consistently high quality of thought and prose, and one has the makings of a Man of Letters -- a quaint designation in this era of celebrity scribes, but valid nevertheless. Wilson's formal structure and traditional style indicate an impatience with the sort of contemporary fiction that makes its own creation a central concern. What matters to him is the contradictions of human nature and the religious impulses that seek to understand the desires of the flesh and the spirit...
These are assuredly old and durable subjects, yet ones that Wilson probes with a comic irony sharpened on the modern world. Inevitably, his work has been compared to the novels of Evelyn Waugh. There are similarities but only "up to a point," as a subordinate in Waugh's Scoop responded when Lord Copper blustered that Yokohama is the capital of Japan. Wilson's comedy is more tolerant than that of the malicious master. Both authors, however, project intimidating confidence in their styles and possess a technical virtuosity that makes the difficult look easy...
...Wilson's deeper ironies that the callow but decent Julian lacks conviction while the older and more experienced Hunter is full of indecent passion and ambition. Hunter's conquest of Felicity is pure business, part of securing the private papers of James Petworth Lampitt, a deceased minor writer who was a friend of her father's. Hunter succeeds, and by playing up Lampitt's possible suicide and probable homosexuality, turns the life of a justifiably forgotten literary figure into a scandalous best seller. "One accomplishes nothing so stylishly as the thing in which one has no belief," thinks Julian. "Gigolos...