Review
This is essentially a slow-moving, seriocomic commentary on modern life and since Angus Wilson is one of its eminent critics, in whatever form he chooses, it reflects his sharp turn of mind while advancing with a certain imperturbable if not remote elegance. A little like that of one of its two central characters, Hamo Langmuir, a plant geneticist or agronomist who has become "the big rice man, the Magic man" of the backward countries and who is supposed to be the source of their physical salvation. Although as an individual, he's something of a strange spore (also a lifelong homosexual until the close when the possibilities of another sort of love are extended to him unlikely as it seems). Via Alexandra, she's his goddaughter, and the second primary character here - Alexandra who's been traveling with the more advanced members of her generation, who's been "asking the wrong questions," who has read too much Lawrence ("emotional rubbish"), who becomes pregnant and goes to Tangier to have her baby in a commune most of which is worshiping in the high camp of a Swami. Ultimately what Mr. Wilson is proving is that neither pure science nor magic (if either exists) is enough and Langmuir goes to his death in India realizing that his work has failed to consider both human and moral concerns as well as the real " 'hopelessness' so endemic in these parts." Wilson's novel proceeds with a good deal of pictorial, decorative scene-setting and small talk parlously close to talkiness; it also fails to include people on an individual basis (you might like Alexandra but few of the others who appear here) rather than as a collective concern in its artful design. Here it falls far short of the sympathetic quotient of The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot years ago or more recently No Laughing Matter. (Kirkus Reviews)
