Setting the World on Fire is Angus Wilson's richest, most complex novel, if, in the last resort, one of the least satisfying. Yet, that being said, the dissatisfaction seems unjustified; all the Wilson skills are displayed, all that imaginative power and reflective insight that makes him for me, possibly the greatest English novelist of the post-war years. So what has gone wrong? It is a deeply symbolic novel, operatic in its symbolism and deliberately so, and perhaps it is just this that is unsettling even for the most devoted Wilson reader; you think regretfully of the calmer texture of Late Call and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot. The opulence of the conception seems to blur the more unobtrusive but crucial novelistic crafts for which Angus Wilson is distinguished.

The central symbolism is architectural. Tothill House, the mansion owned by the Mosson family which occupies a vast tract of central London stretching from Westminster Abbey to St. John's, Smith Square, was built by Sir Roger Pratt, a marvel of classical regularity; within the very centre of the house was inserted, in violent contrast, Vanbrugh's Great Hall, a triumph of baroque flamboyance which carries upon its walls and ceiling Verrio's painting of the Phaethon legend. The Hall, the painting, and Lully's opera Phaethon (originally written for production in the Hall itself but never performed) are the essential matter of the novel: the story that is told is the story of Piers Mosson's ambition—eventually and tragically realised—to stage the production at last.

The secondary symbolism lies in the dispositions of the two heroes—the Mosson brothers, Piers and Tom. They are small boys when we first meet them in 1948 in a powerful and enormously clever scene which at once introduces us to the house and the family and states the novel's theme and direction. Tom, aged six, is weeping with fear in the Great Hall, oppressed by its size and implications; Piers, slightly older, is exhilarated and intoxicated, embarked on his obsession with the place and its subject. Sir Hubert Mosson, the present heir to Tothill, consoles his nephew in the level-headed language with which he has already explained and diminished the myth…. (pp. 59-60)

Ice and fire, order and irregularity; Pratt and Vanbrugh; Phaethon ("tragic, wayward, ambitious living humanity") and Jove ("noble, ordered, smug, dead statuary"). The statements of contrast are threaded through the book, a rich, intricate and heady pattern. The brothers are set in apposition; the worthy, unimaginative Mossons, Hubert and Jackie, his American heiress mother, are complemented by their fiery, dashing Tothill ancestors and by the wealthy Italian, Marina Luzzi, whom Hubert intends to marry, carrying on the family tradition of injections of external wealth when it seems expedient. Marina Luzzi is a central figure, as crucial in her way as the Mossons themselves. The trouble is that she remains flat upon the page when so much else—the house, the Great Hall, most of the large cast of characters—shapes so satisfyingly to the mind's eye: the garden, the rooms, the paintings are seen, the vapid chatter of the boys' poor silly widowed mother Rosemary is heard. But Marina is given a grating idiom that does more to inter her than bring her to life, try as you may you cannot hear it…. (p. 60)

The end is unexpected, shocking and entirely successful. It is not there that the uneasiness lies. Rather, I think, it is with an internal discord between the grandeur of the imagery and the presentation of some of the characters—notably Marina Luzzi but to some extent also the even more vital figures of Tom and Piers, Pratt and Van as they call each other in recognition of their oppositeness. In the long central act of the novel their conversation seldom sounds like that of 17- and 18-year-olds—too measured, too considered surely even for clever public schoolboys with Oxford scholarships. It is as though the all-pervading symbolism has at this point been allowed to obscure the characters through whom it must be presented. They have drowned in it.

And yet, saying this, and it has to be said, one feels a carping wretch. Because there is so much to praise: the accuracy and economy with which we are taken from 1948 to 1956–7 to 1969; the wit; the dramatic force; the neat Wilsonian touches like Rosemary's cultivation of species roses in the late 1950s (Sir Angus has always been a dab hand at the sociology of gardening). The novel gives pleasure—and excitement—on almost every page. Read it and see for yourself. My reservation is simply that the mixture is too rich, the fumes obscure the taste. Maybe such a criticism is in harmony with the language of the novel: structure against flamboyance, coherence against abandon. (pp. 60-1)