[Although] the novel is old enough to have a "tradition," which some would like to mortify by calling "great," writers like Angus Wilson are more likely to be drawn to the form precisely for its vulnerability to shapelessness and its susceptibility to vulgarity than to its respectability. Such a writer exposes himself in the act of writing to the same dangers and possibilities his readers struggle with every day. He is not a superior specimen, but a gifted equal.

During his long and varied career, Angus Wilson has continually experimented with narrative techniques and searched for definitions of his craft that do not exclude the messy world of private and public experience any more than they exclude the ordered world of books. His fiction is an unusual combination of two familiar English traits: earnestness and irony. Part of him is uncertain, groping, tolerant; part of him is knowing and crisp. All of his work, including his earliest short fiction, is a curious mixture of rough spots and polish; yet ease of expression is not an end in itself. He never tries quite the same thing twice. He likes to move on. (p. 39)

Wilson's two most acclaimed and best-known works of the 1950's were ["Anglo-Saxon Attitudes" and "The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot"]…. Both novels contain whole sections of glittering dialogue, wonderfully satiric imitations of academics, politicians, diplomats, artists, scientists…. But although, as Mr. Faulkner argues, Wilson is an expert mimic, he rarely in his mature works allows himself merely to indulge in easy play. In both of these important novels—and this does become a kind of trademark—he probes the inner lives and especially the disappointments of the "unheroic" figures who are the central characters in his fiction: an aging professor facing the end of his career and life, a middle-aged widow who suddenly finds herself with nothing to do.

In his novels since the 1950's ["The Old Men at the Zoo," "No Laughing Matter," and "As If by Magic"] … Wilson not only explores the relationships among very different groups—large families, young children, the very old, bureaucrats, students—but he experiments more and more with narrative form…. What had earlier looked to him like formlessness and snobbery in [the work of Virginia Woolf] and that of other Modernist writers began to look different…. If Wilson's fiction of the 1960's and 70's does not have the sureness of touch of the earlier work, it can be seen as a deliberate and quite courageous reaching after something else by a writer who chose not to relax into a familiar mode.

Wilson's new novel, "Setting the World on Fire," is both the most successful of his departures from tradition and the most explicit dramatization of the conflicts that, in his opinion, make that departure necessary. As in many earlier Modernist works, art is a major theme. Most of the action takes place in a fictitious London estate, Tothill House, and centers on the plans for a production of Jean-Baptiste Lully's opera "Phaethon."… Although some characters in the book regard architecture, music and painting as just so much decor, as background for their ignorant pastimes, the young protagonists, Piers and Tom Mosson, are heirs as much to the artistic spirit of [Tothill House] as they are to the family genes and fortune. For them, the links between esthetic taste, temperament and moral character are powerful. (pp. 39-40)

Between the brothers, as within the house, two distinct conceptions of art are in a state of tension, and yet each is shown to be necessary to the other, to preserve its distinction, to protect it from excess.

Nearly all the other characters in the book represent conscious or unconscious threats to both order and vision, to Tom and Piers. Like Virginia Woolf in "Between the Acts," Wilson takes the considerable risk of representing various combinations of unruliness and tedium until the reader is virtually aching for artistry—understood in the deepest sense—to save the situation…. Like the Modernist writers he has come more and more to appreciate, Wilson leads the reader dangerously close to the edge of the abyss.

But though the effect may be disquieting and at points too close to real tedium for comfort, Wilson's rescue of his material—through the cooperative efforts of Tom and Piers—makes the final third of the book a uniquely dramatic defense of art…. [As] the pacing of the book quickens and the violence of the hostility intensifies, it becomes clearer and clearer that the moral courage of the two brothers, their love for one another and their faith that even the least promising members of the audience might be aroused from torpor are at the heart of their performance.

The novel, like Tothill House or Lully's opera, may or may not survive another hundred years. By forcing us to contemplate a world of forbidden productions, humdrum spoilers and petrified audiences, Angus Wilson reminds us with passion, of what we would be losing. (p. 40)