A. N. Wilson's novels have enjoyed immediate critical success in Britain, and he has worked rapidly to consolidate his reputation with a series of books which combine high comedy with increasingly serious and complex interpretations of British life in the 1970s. While a knowledge of the details of his satirical targets--particular figures in academic and religious and political life, fads of all kinds--will enrich a reading of his novels, these works are by no means limited in relevance to the era of which they form, in the most serious sense, a criticism. Like the early comedies of Evelyn Waugh, they are books which create a symbolic sense of an aimless younger generation and of a hierarchic society in which increasingly troubling patterns of behavior are discerned, substantiated by the discovery of other generations and a search for meaning in explorations into the past.

Andrew Norman Wilson was born...