The Old Men at the Zoo

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A bizarre performance, which has disconcerted many of Mr. Wilson’s English admirers; I have already heard the book described as a burlesque of C. P. Snow, a veiled account of Munich, and a prolonged leg-pull. But Mr. Wilson isn’t the man to fob us off with a private joke, and even when his symbolism seems clumsily contrived it demands serious consideration. One thing is plain: he isn’t concerned with the futuristic aspects of his story. The treatment of politics is perfunctory, the details of warfare vague, the scattered references to social change almost deliberately inept. Mr. Wilson is no H. G. Wells; his theme is present-day England, which he sees lying at the mercy of unbalanced old men and increasingly cut off from reality. The officials and curators in the novel have lost all sense of proportion; after all, a zoo is an important institution, but it is no more the whole world than—shall we say?—a Cambridge college is. In the outside world terrible things are happening, but the old men go tottering to their graves wrapped up in private manias, jealous and pig-headed to the last. Each of the three directors averts his eyes from what he doesn’t want to see, and each suffers horribly as he is overtaken by events. He worked as a reviewer, and in 1955 he resigned from the British Museum to write full-time (although his financial situation did not justify doing so) and moved to Suffolk. There are quite a few passages that we can relate to in The Old Men at The Zoo, such as the perils of a world war that are so terrifying right now, when we face the almost certain arrival of a new crisis (and my wife is out spending god knows where, she has done over many months, in spite of the debts we have, the news that show prices rising, economic activity threated, bad results from the company that provides us with dividends, when the weather if fine) and Putin and his acolytes keep speaking of Armageddon…

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This is definitely a change for Wilson, moving away from his bitter comedy of manners to what might best be described as a political fantasy-cum-allegory. Its themes are freedom and power and, particularly, where they intersect – what we might now call accountability though then would probably have been called responsibility. As it is Wilson, it is also a vicious satire – on politics and politicians, on civil servants, on sex and sexuality, on the European idea. But what it most is a particularly effective allegory on power and freedom. If you like animals, you're going to find this unevenly brilliant dystopian novel pretty rough going, particularly toward the end (Remember DISGRACE? Almost like that). Don't let that dissuade you from reading it, though. Published in 1961, it's set in the early 1970s but exhibits some interesting parallels with today's Britain--e.g., the pugnacious "England-versus-Europe-and-everybody-else" mindset--as well as unsettling intimations of J.G. Ballard, who was publishing his first book right around the time this came out. I get the feeling that if I knew more than I do (i.e., pretty much nothing) about postwar British political history, I might find some lightly disguised characters here--Lord Beaverbrook for one-- in the factional infighting amongst the "old men." We could laugh though when we arrive to the situation where we do not find the lives of some characters so fun to go through, such as these Old Men at The Zoo and then we can think of another great writer, Malcolm Bradbury and his chef d’oeuvre To The Hermitage http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/n... wherein he speaks of the advantage of the literary world over the physical one, the former has personages that are cleverer, more interesting, wiser, attractive, the events in there are more enticing, life is more exuberant (these are not the words of the author, but what I remember of the prose) and then we also have the advantage of getting access to these awesome characters and their beanos, from our room or bed. The added advantage would be that in the artistic realm, we can also disengage suddenly, we are not forced to continue to participate as is the case in the ‘real’ realm – for instance, right now I have a serious crisis on my hands with the spouse, who is out there, maybe in the mountains, carrying with (my) car the family to who knows what spending shindigs and this at a time of crisis, when bills will reach extreme highs for energy, fuel and what not – and if we find The Men at The Zoo irritating, boring o just not appealing enough to stay connected with their saga, well, then we can just stop reading… We often update posts with new information. Here are some of the biggest recent revisions with new research findings:This is so serious, for they even calibrate to say that they could use tactical nuclear weapons, in other words, smaller devices, but still devastating ones, for to my knowledge, they are still more powerful that what they used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for in the meantime, they have ‘pe4fected the capabilities, to the point where the H bomb and others have incredible powers to destroy and kill humans… The Old Men at the Zoo, a 1983 serial for BBC2 based on the novel by Angus Wilson, leaves the flashpoint unfashionably late. Although the threat of war is ever present the focus is very much on preparation, propaganda and domestic politics. Curiously, and rather more indicative of the age in which it was adapted, the nuclear bomb that arrives four fifths of the way through was not even present in the novel. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-03-29 03:10:19 Autocrop_version 0.0.9_books-20210916-0.1 Boxid IA40413314 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Doctor Korczak and the Children, The July Plot, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) – Myth Versus Reality, Stalingrad, Underground, Wear a Very Big Hat, Peter Luke, James MacTaggart, Cedric Messina, Don Taylor. Updated in March 2022. The nuclear aspect, or the prospect of war is so frightening at the present that its presence in the book could work to make it more interesting for some readers – after all, The Old Men at The zoo is included on the list of 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - but it could deter others, such as the under signed

The Old Men at The Zoo by Angus Wilson, author of the much more appreciated, fabulous Anglo-Saxon Attitudes http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/01/a...

War brings some hideous changes to the zoo, and poor old Simon's such a good administrator he forgets to ask the big questions. He leaves that to the old men, and they keep making a mess of it. It's not a very successful novel. The fundamental problem is that the future Wilson predicts is grounded in his 1940s experiences of the British Library and at Bletchley Park. In fact, that's being too kind to Angus. Women were doing crucial work at Bletchley ... why are they only making the teas in his imagined 1970s? Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.11 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-0000490 Openlibrary_edition