Setting the world on fire - Angus Wilson

In the great baroque hall at Tothill House, Vanbrugh’s addition to the otherwise classical structure built by Sir Roger Pratt, depicting the fall of Phaeton, ten-year-old Piers Mosson stands in wonder and begins slowly to dance. His mind is already full of dreams, of a fame that will set the world on fire.

To his younger brother, Tom, whom he dearly loves, the hall was terrifying. It took all his Uncle Hubert’s persuasiveness to calm his fears.

Such is the opening of Angus Wilson’s rich, complex, dramatic new novel of England’s post-war years, whose central theme is the love of the two brothers whose careers in very different spheres mark the desire, and the reluctance, to set the world on fire.

Rich in characterization, brilliant in its scenes of comedy, scintillating in the aptness of the dialogue, Setting the World On Fire has a deeper dramatic undertone and a finale stranger than Angus Wilson has previously attempted. It closes with a crisis as unexpected as it is convincing, and the varying moods of post-war English society from 1948 to 1969 are marvellously caught.

In his fiction, Angus Wilson never repeats himself; in Setting The World On Fire he charts a new and deeply satisfying course.