From Publishers Weekly
Readers who enjoyed the wickedly satiric portrait of an eccentric family in Incline Our Hearts and were moved by narrator Julian Ramsey's coming-of-age travails in A Bottle in the Smoke may be disappointed in this final volume of the trilogy. Wilson continues his exploration of larger themes: the untrustworthiness of memory, and therefore of biography; the transformation of history into myths, which mankind requires for solace; the process by which secrets come to light and change one's views of past events. But the narrative, while intellectually acute, is intrinsically dull and lifeless. The eponymous "daughters of Albion" are the numerous young women who come under the spell of a charismatic man named Rice Robey, who in the '20s wrote popular books under the pseudonym of Albion Pugh. When he crosses Julian's path in the 1960s, Robey/Pugh also reinvolves him in a "conjunction of personal destinies," with the eccentric Lampitt family, whose members represent various strata of British society, political affiliations and contributions to the arts. Readers are also subjected to "excerpts" from Pugh's long epic poem conveying his iconoclastic religious vision, a device that drags the already lagging narrative to a dead halt. In this volume, the magic lure of the Lampitts has worn thin, the other characters are less than compelling and the melancholy tone of the story ameliorates even the pleasure of reading Wilson's intelligent prose.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this third volume of his "Lampitt trilogy," Wilson continues to probe into the nature of myth--a transformation of reality that then assumes an even more powerful life of its own, becoming for us a truth in its own right. This myth building is a very personal process that in the right circumstances can have wide-ranging impact on others. Hence, the interjection of Albion Pugh's story of St. Paul into the otherwise more personal mythologization of Pugh by Wilson's narrator, Julian Ramsay. Ramsay is fascinated by the almost mystical attraction Pugh (a physically unimposing figure) holds for a variety of women, many of them much younger than he. What is the "truth" about Pugh and, in the end, do the "facts" really matter? Unfortunately, for all its intelligence, the story never quite succeeds in grabbing the reader's attention. The plot drags at times and the characters, for the most part, lack vitality. A not unworthy purchase for academic and larger public libraries, but one not likely to generate a large audience. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/91.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
