It is well known that Wilson has been complicating his art in the later novels, beginning with No Laughing Matter…. His early novels, notably Hemlock and After, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, sat comfortably if not comfortingly within the tradition of English realism. They were about what they appeared to be about, no more and no less. Mainly, they were about the comedy, irony, and tragedy of social existence, of being present to oneself by being present, necessarily, to other people. Wilson showed a critical interest in his subject, observing the instances of personal and social life with an eye keen enough for every decent purpose but not self-consciously sharpened for the occasion. As in the short stories of Such Darling Dodos, what was observed was not humiliated by the mind that observed it. In Hemlock and After and the other early novels, Wilson was vigilant about characters when vigilance was what they deserved, but he did not imply that they existed only to be detected or to appease his ironic zeal. His eye for revealing detail, his ear for nuances and idiosyncrasies of speech were acute within the limits imposed by generosity: he did not presume to dispose of his characters merely by finding them fallible. Fallible in one degree or another, they were unfailingly interesting, it was easy to care about them.

Some of this interest is carried over into Setting the World on Fire, especially in a passage where Miss Lantry's "social certainty" meets social muddle in the person of Mr. Brownlow, who can only live by making exceptions, seeing things afresh, starting over. But very little of the new novel ministers to such expectations. A passage in No Laughing Matter alerts the reader to look out for a new relation among the constituents of Wilson's fiction: it comes when the writer Margaret Matthews is described as beginning something new, "something fuller, something that, instead of putting a sharp line under life's episodes, would capture the fusion of all the moments, happy, unhappy." Putting a sharp line under life's episodes is what Wilson's early short stories and novels were engaged in. Capturing the fusion of all the moments is evidently what he has been trying to do since No Laughing Matter.

The effort has involved, in No Laughing Matter, As If By Magic …, and the new novel [Setting the World on Fire], a more explicit relation between events and meanings. Wilson's art has always veered between confidence that the events shown will bring their meaning with them and determination that the meaning will be declared, at whatever cost to the vagary of the events. It is a problem of the relation between detail and pattern; detail so abundant that it threatens every possible pattern; pattern so resolute that it threatens to impoverish the detail.

I am afraid the new novel is all pattern, and that the fusion has not been achieved. You can't read a page of it without feeling the novelist nudging you to appreciate the meaning similitudes, contrasts, Tom and Piers, Pratt and Vanbrugh, the Great House containing its constituents in powerful balance, Vanbrugh and Lully as wild men thriving upon solid ground, classic and romantic, the King of France, "the parallel of Lully's brilliant art and Louis's solemn regality." And of course, the House, which is also the House of Fiction. To say that piers is Phaethon is to say also that he is more Phaethon than he is Piers; except that in the uplifting end he is saved from Zeus's thunderbolt. Setting the World on Fire achieves its portentous meaning at the cost of its life; meaning has done the work of the thunderbolt.

Emotion in Wilson's fiction has always been acute but limited, limited to its provocation by the social muddle, acute in the expression mainly of distaste. In his recent novels the distaste is directed against those in power, the old men at the zoo, running things and running them amok. What the recent novels have lacked is energy, so that even their intelligence seems weary of itself and its perceptions. There is some evidence that Wilson the novelist and Wilson the critic of the novel are thwarting each other. Teaching fiction, these days, is no help to the release of a powerful creative urge. I am aware that there is more to the urge than its release. No matter. My point is that Wilson seems to have allowed recent arguments about the theory of fiction to inhibit the spontaneity so clear in Hemlock and After and the other early novels. Teaching fiction, he is bound to ask himself: after such knowledge, what forgiveness?

It is well known that the assumptions of realism have been, as some critics like to say, put in question. The only quality of realism still in high standing with avant garde critics is its intermittent tendency to destroy itself. Many critics seem to be delighted to hand over the realistic enterprise to popular fiction, the TV drama, and the minor efforts of film. Till recently, these conveyances have mostly been French and American. But it is evident that many English novelists who have professed realism in one degree or another are now themselves losing faith. Normally, critics explain matters of style, form, and structure in terms ultimately metaphysical: we claim to discover a writer's ontology in his sentence. What is happening in English fiction seems to require rather a political explanation than anything as high as metaphysics. Wilson's querulousness, his contempt for our masters, his insistence on induced meanings and willed relations do not issue from a deep creative source but from post-imperial disappointment. The relation between the English novel, bourgeois liberalism, and the certitudes of empire is still unclear, but a tetchy sense of it as issuing chiefly in frustrated idealism and guilt seems to correspond to Wilson's new novel. (pp. 21-2)