Less
Than Angels by
published 1955
[excerpt] As they got out of the bus and walked along the road, they heard a number of explosions, some in the distance, others startlingly near, and once the night sky was illuminated by a rocket which broke in a shower of green and golden stars. There was a smell of gunpowder in the cool frosty air. ‘Why, it’s Guy Fawkes night,’ said Miss Clovis, ‘what fun!’
…They ventured further into the garden, then stopped in the
middle of the lawn to gasp at the sight that met their eyes. A large bonfire of
sticks and garden rubbish was blazing beyond the vegetable patch. Two figures,
a tall man and a small woman, were poking at it vigorously with long sticks,
pausing from time to time to throw on to it bundles of paper which they were
taking from a tin trunk which stood on the ground nearby. ‘Alaric, what are you
doing?’ Miss Lydgate’s voice had now risen to a screech.
‘Why, hullo, Gertrude,’ he said, ‘we’re having a bonfire.’
‘Yes,’ said Catherine, her face shining in the firelight,
‘Alaric had so much junk up in his attic and Guy Fawkes night seemed seemed
just the time to get rid of some of it.’
comments: Alaric Lydgate, a retired anthropologist, has been hoarding
trunkloads of notes, all his researches from years spent in the field in Africa.
Now he is living in the London suburbs and looks like an Easter Island stature.
In an absurd sideline of this book he meets an unlikely new friend Catherine,
and yes she is going to unblock him with her suggestion that he get rid of all
the boxes of stuff. It is not as blatant as that sounds: just an enjoyable
moment in the book.
But not everything will go. Alaric likes to sit around
wearing items from his collection of African masks: in the house or even in the
garden, to the surprise of his suburban neighbours. His new friend Catherine,
one feels, is more likely to try one on herself than tell him to get rid of
them.
Right at the end of Less Than Angels, someone says
this
‘What odd turns life does
take! And how much more comfortable it sometimes was to observe it from a
distance, to look down from an upper window, as it were, as the anthropologists
did.’
But the message of the book, if there is one, is that that
is not what we should be doing: we should be looking in new directions, and
consider new options. It’s a charming and delightful book, with an interesting
construction: Pym takes us into scenes with one person then out with another,
and we learn a lot about the Anthropological Institute and its characters.
Less Than Angels has featured on the
blog before.
Top picture, Zanzibar bonfire games, Wikimedia
Commons
Mende mask from Sierra Leone, NYPL
Ibeji twin figures with masks and cowrie shells, NYPL
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