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The Old Men at the Zoo
Set in a near future (the novel was first published in 1961 and is set in the period 1970–73), this is Angus Wilson's most allegorical novel, about a doomed attempt to set up a reserve for wild animals. Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice of his gifts as a naturalist. But power is more than just the complicated game played by the old men at the zoo in the satirical first half of this novel: it lies very near to violence, and in the second half real life inexorably turns to fantasy – the fantasy of war. This tense and at times brutal story offers the healing relationship between man and the natural world as a solution for the power dilemma.
362 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
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About the author
Angus Wilson
89 books42 followersSir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson, KBE (11 August 1913 – 31 May 1991) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and later received a knighthood for his services to literature.
Wilson was born in Bexhill, Sussex, England, to an English father and South African mother. He was educated at Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford, and in 1937 became a librarian in the British Museum's Department of Printed Books, working on the new General Catalogue. During World War II, he worked in the Naval section Hut 8 at the code-breaking establishment, Bletchley Park, translating Italian Naval codes.
The work situation was stressful and led to a nervous breakdown, for which he was treated by Rolf-Werner Kosterlitz. He returned to the Museum after the end of the War, and it was there that he met Tony Garrett (born 1929), who was to be his companion for the rest of his life.
Wilson's first publication was a collection of short stories, The Wrong Set (1949), followed quickly by the daring novel Hemlock and After, which was a great success, prompting invitations to lecture in Europe.
He worked as a reviewer, and in 1955 he resigned from the British Museum to write full-time (although his financial situation did not justify doing so) and moved to Suffolk.
From 1957 he gave lectures further afield, in Japan, Switzerland, Australia, and the USA. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1968, and received many literary honours in succeeding years. He was knighted in 1980, and was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 1983 to 1988. His remaining years were affected by ill health, and he died of a stroke at a nursing home in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on 31 May 1991, aged 77.
His writing, which has a strongly satirical vein, expresses his concern with preserving a liberal humanistic outlook in the face of fashionable doctrinaire temptations. Several of his works were adapted for television. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 1978, and jointly helped to establish their creative writing course at masters level in 1970, which was then a groundbreaking initiative in the United Kingdom.
Wilson was born in Bexhill, Sussex, England, to an English father and South African mother. He was educated at Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford, and in 1937 became a librarian in the British Museum's Department of Printed Books, working on the new General Catalogue. During World War II, he worked in the Naval section Hut 8 at the code-breaking establishment, Bletchley Park, translating Italian Naval codes.
The work situation was stressful and led to a nervous breakdown, for which he was treated by Rolf-Werner Kosterlitz. He returned to the Museum after the end of the War, and it was there that he met Tony Garrett (born 1929), who was to be his companion for the rest of his life.
Wilson's first publication was a collection of short stories, The Wrong Set (1949), followed quickly by the daring novel Hemlock and After, which was a great success, prompting invitations to lecture in Europe.
He worked as a reviewer, and in 1955 he resigned from the British Museum to write full-time (although his financial situation did not justify doing so) and moved to Suffolk.
From 1957 he gave lectures further afield, in Japan, Switzerland, Australia, and the USA. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1968, and received many literary honours in succeeding years. He was knighted in 1980, and was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 1983 to 1988. His remaining years were affected by ill health, and he died of a stroke at a nursing home in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on 31 May 1991, aged 77.
His writing, which has a strongly satirical vein, expresses his concern with preserving a liberal humanistic outlook in the face of fashionable doctrinaire temptations. Several of his works were adapted for television. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 1978, and jointly helped to establish their creative writing course at masters level in 1970, which was then a groundbreaking initiative in the United Kingdom.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 28, 2013
It's not a very successful novel. The fundamental problem is that the future Wilson predicts is grounded in his 1940s experiences of the British Library and at Bletchley Park. In fact, that's being too kind to Angus. Women were doing crucial work at Bletchley ... why are they only making the teas in his imagined 1970s?
He's gives us London Zoo ran by various old men and administered by an outsider, Simon Carter, as an allegory of sorts for life, political life, in post-war Britain. Dr Leacock, the Director, is an old buffer who believes in "limited liberty" and wants to build a new zoo in the countryside where the animals will roam free. But, and I guess Wilson's saying it's a problem for many liberals, Leacock doesn't work very hard to achieve this ... and when it falls in to his lap he is very bad at setting the limits to this liberty. In the end, his promiscuous daughter, representing total liberty, is very much the source of his downfall.
Sir Robert Falcon, Curator of Mammals, becomes the next Director and he lusts after a Victorian zoo and a nineteenth-century approach to Britain and Empire. He's a practical man for the most part, but probably impotent. Both Leacock and Falcon are both rather "all mouth and no trousers". Lord Godmanchester, President of the Zoological Society, is a man who really gets things done ... but gets them done for a higher aim, which may, in fact, merely be his own political career. Yet as a statesman he's getting in the way of progress and unwittingly ensuring that there has to be a smash.
At the centre of this is Simon, the outsider. He has an American wife, no professional zoological qualifications, he's from the Treasury, and briefly had his own wildlife series on TV. The old duffers thing he's rather odd. Yet he gets things done. The book opens with the death of a young keeper and Simon having to decide which of his colleagues should be held accountable, or whether he should agree to sweep the incident under the carpet. And from there its politicking all along for poor old Simon. Of course, he'd rather be doing something else ... wouldn't we all? ... but his wife has money and encourages him to do something else ... so why doesn't he?
War brings some hideous changes to the zoo, and poor old Simon's such a good administrator he forgets to ask the big questions. He leaves that to the old men, and they keep making a mess of it.
Interesting read with some good dialogue. But rather dated now.
"'Great tragedy of that kind, Carter, is a very beautiful thing, you know.'"
"'I've heard extraordinary things about her. I had a beer up at Stretton station with one or two of the younger keepers. And naturally we talked a good deal of smut.'
'I don't know why you say naturally. They never talk smut with me.'"
"'I must say I never thought Leacock would have a Messalina for a daughter. In fact she seems to start where the Empress left off.'"
"'Yes. He's a terrible bounder, isn't he? Like an advertisement for whisky."
He's gives us London Zoo ran by various old men and administered by an outsider, Simon Carter, as an allegory of sorts for life, political life, in post-war Britain. Dr Leacock, the Director, is an old buffer who believes in "limited liberty" and wants to build a new zoo in the countryside where the animals will roam free. But, and I guess Wilson's saying it's a problem for many liberals, Leacock doesn't work very hard to achieve this ... and when it falls in to his lap he is very bad at setting the limits to this liberty. In the end, his promiscuous daughter, representing total liberty, is very much the source of his downfall.
Sir Robert Falcon, Curator of Mammals, becomes the next Director and he lusts after a Victorian zoo and a nineteenth-century approach to Britain and Empire. He's a practical man for the most part, but probably impotent. Both Leacock and Falcon are both rather "all mouth and no trousers". Lord Godmanchester, President of the Zoological Society, is a man who really gets things done ... but gets them done for a higher aim, which may, in fact, merely be his own political career. Yet as a statesman he's getting in the way of progress and unwittingly ensuring that there has to be a smash.
At the centre of this is Simon, the outsider. He has an American wife, no professional zoological qualifications, he's from the Treasury, and briefly had his own wildlife series on TV. The old duffers thing he's rather odd. Yet he gets things done. The book opens with the death of a young keeper and Simon having to decide which of his colleagues should be held accountable, or whether he should agree to sweep the incident under the carpet. And from there its politicking all along for poor old Simon. Of course, he'd rather be doing something else ... wouldn't we all? ... but his wife has money and encourages him to do something else ... so why doesn't he?
War brings some hideous changes to the zoo, and poor old Simon's such a good administrator he forgets to ask the big questions. He leaves that to the old men, and they keep making a mess of it.
Interesting read with some good dialogue. But rather dated now.
"'Great tragedy of that kind, Carter, is a very beautiful thing, you know.'"
"'I've heard extraordinary things about her. I had a beer up at Stretton station with one or two of the younger keepers. And naturally we talked a good deal of smut.'
'I don't know why you say naturally. They never talk smut with me.'"
"'I must say I never thought Leacock would have a Messalina for a daughter. In fact she seems to start where the Empress left off.'"
"'Yes. He's a terrible bounder, isn't he? Like an advertisement for whisky."
September 1, 2016
If you like animals, you're going to find this unevenly brilliant dystopian novel pretty rough going, particularly toward the end (Remember DISGRACE? Almost like that). Don't let that dissuade you from reading it, though. Published in 1961, it's set in the early 1970s but exhibits some interesting parallels with today's Britain--e.g., the pugnacious "England-versus-Europe-and-everybody-else" mindset--as well as unsettling intimations of J.G. Ballard, who was publishing his first book right around the time this came out. I get the feeling that if I knew more than I do (i.e., pretty much nothing) about postwar British political history, I might find some lightly disguised characters here--Lord Beaverbrook for one-- in the factional infighting amongst the "old men."
This is one bitter satire, man. It's witty and razor-sharp, radiant with Cold War paranoia, and ultimately depressing. It's also punctuated with some of the most beautiful and moving descriptions of animals I've ever read, made all the more affecting because they are delivered by a suavely unlikable protagonist in the midst of a dark and apocalyptic landscape.
This is one bitter satire, man. It's witty and razor-sharp, radiant with Cold War paranoia, and ultimately depressing. It's also punctuated with some of the most beautiful and moving descriptions of animals I've ever read, made all the more affecting because they are delivered by a suavely unlikable protagonist in the midst of a dark and apocalyptic landscape.
July 23, 2012
Fluent and disappointing. A novel about office politics shading into political shenanigans. As a novel about the not-so-distant future, Wilson fails to register the 20th century's most basic change, that is, the change of status in women from housewives to full members of society. The weirdest thing about the book is the portrayal of a world in which men have entire extended families fully dependent on them for survival. These families stay at home, neurasthenic and unhappy, while the paterfamilias hides out at his job. Lots of British wit but not much else.
November 30, 2016
This novel took me a long time to read as I never really got into it. It falls into the genre of dystopian-future-of-the-past, having been published in 1961 and set in the 70s. The pacing is bafflingly inconsistent. For the first four fifths or so, the plot is purely bureaucratic machinations and office politics within London Zoo. The pacing is slow, sometimes tortuously so. Our protagonist, Simon Carter, comes off as something of a self-important jerk, but all his colleagues seem equally if not more tedious. None of the female characters are developed with any great depth, exist only in relation to men, and their portrayal creates a depressing atmosphere of misogyny. The final fifth of the book covers the eventual outbreak of a long-awaited European war, so is at least more exciting. Carter doesn’t make for a particularly useful or interesting point of view from which to see it, though.
I struggled to decide whether I was missing a sly allegory for European politics in the zoo’s administrative issues. It’s probably there, but I don’t have enough knowledge of 1960s history to appreciate it. The sense of impending destruction kept me reading, although to my mind there wasn’t enough explanation of the conflict’s causes. Our protagonist Carter seemed basically disinterested in it, worrying instead about the administration of the zoo. There was a shambolically farcical element to the zoo’s tribulations that was quite effective. Ultimately, though, it was an effort to read a novel about London Zoo in which I disliked all the characters, failed to discern an allegory, and wondered constantly why the actual fauna made so few appearances.
I struggled to decide whether I was missing a sly allegory for European politics in the zoo’s administrative issues. It’s probably there, but I don’t have enough knowledge of 1960s history to appreciate it. The sense of impending destruction kept me reading, although to my mind there wasn’t enough explanation of the conflict’s causes. Our protagonist Carter seemed basically disinterested in it, worrying instead about the administration of the zoo. There was a shambolically farcical element to the zoo’s tribulations that was quite effective. Ultimately, though, it was an effort to read a novel about London Zoo in which I disliked all the characters, failed to discern an allegory, and wondered constantly why the actual fauna made so few appearances.
January 25, 2025
Magnífica introspección de personajes y sociedades, novela que a partir del entorno cerrado de un zoo se percibe el ambiente del país y del mundo.
Las jerarquías laborales y sociales, los cargos otorgados, los motivos políticos y una civilización que se autodestruye y renace de sus cenizas para crear "un orden nuevo".
El protagonista se distancia de los hechos con cinismo pero nunca deja de intentar reconducir la situación, un planteamiento optimista a pesar de la crudeza de algunas situaciones.
Las jerarquías laborales y sociales, los cargos otorgados, los motivos políticos y una civilización que se autodestruye y renace de sus cenizas para crear "un orden nuevo".
El protagonista se distancia de los hechos con cinismo pero nunca deja de intentar reconducir la situación, un planteamiento optimista a pesar de la crudeza de algunas situaciones.
fic-guided
August 8, 2020Wilson’s fiction deserves to be better remembered than it is. This is his masterpiece, one of the finest ‘Condition of England’ novels of the early sixties – a period when England’s condition was in flux: one world dead, the other struggling to be born. Wilson had come to fiction late, in his forties. He was, by earlier profession, a talented civil servant. His major work was putting the British Museum Library holdings back together after the war, which had destroyed a quarter of a million of them. Wilson understood that Britain was most essentially embodied in its great institutions: Whitehall being the greatest and most labyrinthine.
The narrative is projected into the early 1970s (the novel is often classified, misleadingly, as science fiction). Simon Carter, the central character, had been a rising star in the Treasury, where the cleverest of the clever end up. He’s a wizard with tables and statistics. Coming into money on his marriage to a rich American wife, as a lover of animals (particularly badgers) he chooses a more relaxed career by getting himself appointed Secretary of the Zoological Gardens (the ‘Zoo’) in Regent’s Park – a government-run institution. Life there proves to be anything but relaxed. The two ‘old men’ at the top of the institution are locked in a struggle about how the zoo should go forward. One wants to keep the beautiful mid-Victorian ‘gardens’ as a museum of living things, with its wrought-iron cages, compounds, penguins, animal houses and ‘rides’. His opponent wants a ‘wild animal park’, where animals can range freely. It’s a version of the quarrel conducted in the 1930s between the institution and naturalists like Julian Huxley, which ended with the awkward dualism between Regent’s Park and Whipsnade.
The first hundred pages of Wilson’s narrative revolve around a symbolic event which crystallises moral issues. A young keeper is killed by a giraffe – killed horribly (it stamps on his testicles while he is impaled on a spiked fence). Giraffes are regarded as gentle. But this one, ‘Smokey’, was terminally ill and should have been shot. The advocate for Victorianism had declined to do so. And, of course, the accident would never have happened in a wild animal park. Meanwhile Britain – in self-imposed exile from the European Union – is increasingly in conflict with its continental neighbours and there is a nuclear exchange. The animals have to be evacuated and chaos ensues, in which the country reverts to ‘savagery’ – nature, red in tooth and claw. The nation now understands what the ‘wild’ in ‘wild animal park’ actually means.
Wilson’s jaundiced narrative tone is infected at times with outright bitchiness; he does not love humans in general. It adds a sour readability to the novel. The following observation, as Simon strolls through the zoo, indicates his feelings about the British people:
The high hysterical barking of the sea lions took me to their pool to watch the crowd watch the keeper throwing fish to feed the beasts. Automatically I registered faces – fat men, thin women, rhomboid children, figures all from a strip cartoon.
The animals, by contrast, are lovely; natural. Until, that is, they kill. There’s a particularly nasty subplot involving an Alsatian dog which kills his mistress and sex-partner. Bestiality plays a central part in the second half of the novel, culminating in a scene in which Simon is obliged to eat one of his beloved badgers.
The Old Men at the Zoo focuses on a perennial crisis in British life, which was particularly acute in the sixties. Britain is the only major country in the world with a governing party which proclaims itself ‘Conservative’ – dedicated to holding on to the past. When the book was published in 1961, the PM was Harold Macmillan – the most fuddy-duddy of Tory leaders, lover of Trollope’s fiction and wearer of wing-collars. Meanwhile, sex, drugs and rock and roll were brewing up. Old men or young rebels? Half a century on it would be good to think history has answered the big questions Wilson’s novel asks. It hasn’t.
The narrative is projected into the early 1970s (the novel is often classified, misleadingly, as science fiction). Simon Carter, the central character, had been a rising star in the Treasury, where the cleverest of the clever end up. He’s a wizard with tables and statistics. Coming into money on his marriage to a rich American wife, as a lover of animals (particularly badgers) he chooses a more relaxed career by getting himself appointed Secretary of the Zoological Gardens (the ‘Zoo’) in Regent’s Park – a government-run institution. Life there proves to be anything but relaxed. The two ‘old men’ at the top of the institution are locked in a struggle about how the zoo should go forward. One wants to keep the beautiful mid-Victorian ‘gardens’ as a museum of living things, with its wrought-iron cages, compounds, penguins, animal houses and ‘rides’. His opponent wants a ‘wild animal park’, where animals can range freely. It’s a version of the quarrel conducted in the 1930s between the institution and naturalists like Julian Huxley, which ended with the awkward dualism between Regent’s Park and Whipsnade.
The first hundred pages of Wilson’s narrative revolve around a symbolic event which crystallises moral issues. A young keeper is killed by a giraffe – killed horribly (it stamps on his testicles while he is impaled on a spiked fence). Giraffes are regarded as gentle. But this one, ‘Smokey’, was terminally ill and should have been shot. The advocate for Victorianism had declined to do so. And, of course, the accident would never have happened in a wild animal park. Meanwhile Britain – in self-imposed exile from the European Union – is increasingly in conflict with its continental neighbours and there is a nuclear exchange. The animals have to be evacuated and chaos ensues, in which the country reverts to ‘savagery’ – nature, red in tooth and claw. The nation now understands what the ‘wild’ in ‘wild animal park’ actually means.
Wilson’s jaundiced narrative tone is infected at times with outright bitchiness; he does not love humans in general. It adds a sour readability to the novel. The following observation, as Simon strolls through the zoo, indicates his feelings about the British people:
The high hysterical barking of the sea lions took me to their pool to watch the crowd watch the keeper throwing fish to feed the beasts. Automatically I registered faces – fat men, thin women, rhomboid children, figures all from a strip cartoon.
The animals, by contrast, are lovely; natural. Until, that is, they kill. There’s a particularly nasty subplot involving an Alsatian dog which kills his mistress and sex-partner. Bestiality plays a central part in the second half of the novel, culminating in a scene in which Simon is obliged to eat one of his beloved badgers.
The Old Men at the Zoo focuses on a perennial crisis in British life, which was particularly acute in the sixties. Britain is the only major country in the world with a governing party which proclaims itself ‘Conservative’ – dedicated to holding on to the past. When the book was published in 1961, the PM was Harold Macmillan – the most fuddy-duddy of Tory leaders, lover of Trollope’s fiction and wearer of wing-collars. Meanwhile, sex, drugs and rock and roll were brewing up. Old men or young rebels? Half a century on it would be good to think history has answered the big questions Wilson’s novel asks. It hasn’t.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 20, 2025
The Old Men at The Zoo by Angus Wilson, author of the much more appreciated, fabulous Anglo-Saxon Attitudes http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/01/a...
7 out of 10
“The person who doesn't read lives only one life…The reader lives 5,000…Reading is immortality backwards’ – this is what Umberto Eco said and that is of such great help to one who does little except for reading, or having books read by others, as in audiobooks like Rabbit, Run by John Updike http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/r... finished the other day -
We could laugh though when we arrive to the situation where we do not find the lives of some characters so fun to go through, such as these Old Men at The Zoo and then we can think of another great writer, Malcolm Bradbury and his chef d’oeuvre To The Hermitage http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/n... wherein he speaks of the advantage of the literary world over the physical one, the former has personages that are cleverer, more interesting, wiser, attractive, the events in there are more enticing, life is more exuberant (these are not the words of the author, but what I remember of the prose) and then we also have the advantage of getting access to these awesome characters and their beanos, from our room or bed.
The added advantage would be that in the artistic realm, we can also disengage suddenly, we are not forced to continue to participate as is the case in the ‘real’ realm – for instance, right now I have a serious crisis on my hands with the spouse, who is out there, maybe in the mountains, carrying with (my) car the family to who knows what spending shindigs and this at a time of crisis, when bills will reach extreme highs for energy, fuel and what not – and if we find The Men at The Zoo irritating, boring o just not appealing enough to stay connected with their saga, well, then we can just stop reading…
This is what I did, finding the term ‘Hideous kinky’, which I generally applied for wondrous, fabulous magnum opera, to be more suitable here for the first part – Hideous Kinky is a mesmerizing saga by Esther Freud, daughter of acclaimed painter (absent in the childhood of the writer, if we look into the novel) Lucien Freud and great-granddaughter of the titanic Sigmund Freud http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/06/h... - though I am exaggerating for mirthful purposes…
There are quite a few passages that we can relate to in The Old Men at The Zoo, such as the perils of a world war that are so terrifying right now, when we face the almost certain arrival of a new crisis (and my wife is out spending god knows where, she has done over many months, in spite of the debts we have, the news that show prices rising, economic activity threated, bad results from the company that provides us with dividends, when the weather if fine) and Putin and his acolytes keep speaking of Armageddon…
This is so serious, for they even calibrate to say that they could use tactical nuclear weapons, in other words, smaller devices, but still devastating ones, for to my knowledge, they are still more powerful that what they used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for in the meantime, they have ‘pe4fected the capabilities, to the point where the H bomb and others have incredible powers to destroy and kill humans…
Thinking about it, maybe that was one of the reasons why The Old Men at The Zoo became somewhat redundant, and it is also way too long in my view, for the winding, rather uninteresting on so many pages story of the giraffe that kills a keeper at the London Zoo, sometime in the future, which is placed around the 1970s, and the consequent look for culprits, the evasion of the manager, the effort to avoid such cases in the future, competing with the need for a good image to be preserved, so that a new National Zoological Park could be established, and the priority for the latter matter would see that the death of the new, inexperienced keeper, killed by a sick giraffe does not affect the project
There are details to follow there, such as the fact that the giraffe has been sick, her liver was causing pain and she should have been euthanized, but in the name of that aforementioned vital issue, the new Zoological Park, the giraffe was kept alive, so that it can serve the ‘higher cause’, and the new man had not known so well how to approach the animal and thus the giraffe had been scared presumably and then such an innocent, peaceful being normally, took fright and defended itself with violence.
The nuclear aspect, or the prospect of war is so frightening at the present that its presence in the book could work to make it more interesting for some readers – after all, The Old Men at The zoo is included on the list of 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - but it could deter others, such as the under signed
Finally, there is the aspect of the Zoo which I have had at home and reading about the Men at the Zoo did not bring back phenomenal memories…the same wife I was complaining about earlier has decided about fifteen years ago to have six…dogs, and not just any kind of pet, but borzoi, those that fit into ‘giant breed’ category, in other words, the equivalent of maybe north of one hundred Chihuahuas…
Therefore, with the financial crisis of 2008, this became such a burden that I became crazy, and hence you have notes like these – fortunately, I do know that those who stick around to reach this far into the nonsense clearly have similar, if not worse issues, so we are free to go ahead – and feeding all these beasts and well, anybody for that matter became a serious challenge, and it had to be done accumulating debt.
Indeed, it is not fair to play the IIWFY game detailed in the psychology classic Games People Play by Eric Berne http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/09/g... a game which involves us blaming the consort for something we could not achieve, and the fact that we have two macaws is partly my choice (one was brought home by Throw Mama From The Train) and then we could all do this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
7 out of 10
“The person who doesn't read lives only one life…The reader lives 5,000…Reading is immortality backwards’ – this is what Umberto Eco said and that is of such great help to one who does little except for reading, or having books read by others, as in audiobooks like Rabbit, Run by John Updike http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/r... finished the other day -
We could laugh though when we arrive to the situation where we do not find the lives of some characters so fun to go through, such as these Old Men at The Zoo and then we can think of another great writer, Malcolm Bradbury and his chef d’oeuvre To The Hermitage http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/n... wherein he speaks of the advantage of the literary world over the physical one, the former has personages that are cleverer, more interesting, wiser, attractive, the events in there are more enticing, life is more exuberant (these are not the words of the author, but what I remember of the prose) and then we also have the advantage of getting access to these awesome characters and their beanos, from our room or bed.
The added advantage would be that in the artistic realm, we can also disengage suddenly, we are not forced to continue to participate as is the case in the ‘real’ realm – for instance, right now I have a serious crisis on my hands with the spouse, who is out there, maybe in the mountains, carrying with (my) car the family to who knows what spending shindigs and this at a time of crisis, when bills will reach extreme highs for energy, fuel and what not – and if we find The Men at The Zoo irritating, boring o just not appealing enough to stay connected with their saga, well, then we can just stop reading…
This is what I did, finding the term ‘Hideous kinky’, which I generally applied for wondrous, fabulous magnum opera, to be more suitable here for the first part – Hideous Kinky is a mesmerizing saga by Esther Freud, daughter of acclaimed painter (absent in the childhood of the writer, if we look into the novel) Lucien Freud and great-granddaughter of the titanic Sigmund Freud http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/06/h... - though I am exaggerating for mirthful purposes…
There are quite a few passages that we can relate to in The Old Men at The Zoo, such as the perils of a world war that are so terrifying right now, when we face the almost certain arrival of a new crisis (and my wife is out spending god knows where, she has done over many months, in spite of the debts we have, the news that show prices rising, economic activity threated, bad results from the company that provides us with dividends, when the weather if fine) and Putin and his acolytes keep speaking of Armageddon…
This is so serious, for they even calibrate to say that they could use tactical nuclear weapons, in other words, smaller devices, but still devastating ones, for to my knowledge, they are still more powerful that what they used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for in the meantime, they have ‘pe4fected the capabilities, to the point where the H bomb and others have incredible powers to destroy and kill humans…
Thinking about it, maybe that was one of the reasons why The Old Men at The Zoo became somewhat redundant, and it is also way too long in my view, for the winding, rather uninteresting on so many pages story of the giraffe that kills a keeper at the London Zoo, sometime in the future, which is placed around the 1970s, and the consequent look for culprits, the evasion of the manager, the effort to avoid such cases in the future, competing with the need for a good image to be preserved, so that a new National Zoological Park could be established, and the priority for the latter matter would see that the death of the new, inexperienced keeper, killed by a sick giraffe does not affect the project
There are details to follow there, such as the fact that the giraffe has been sick, her liver was causing pain and she should have been euthanized, but in the name of that aforementioned vital issue, the new Zoological Park, the giraffe was kept alive, so that it can serve the ‘higher cause’, and the new man had not known so well how to approach the animal and thus the giraffe had been scared presumably and then such an innocent, peaceful being normally, took fright and defended itself with violence.
The nuclear aspect, or the prospect of war is so frightening at the present that its presence in the book could work to make it more interesting for some readers – after all, The Old Men at The zoo is included on the list of 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - but it could deter others, such as the under signed
Finally, there is the aspect of the Zoo which I have had at home and reading about the Men at the Zoo did not bring back phenomenal memories…the same wife I was complaining about earlier has decided about fifteen years ago to have six…dogs, and not just any kind of pet, but borzoi, those that fit into ‘giant breed’ category, in other words, the equivalent of maybe north of one hundred Chihuahuas…
Therefore, with the financial crisis of 2008, this became such a burden that I became crazy, and hence you have notes like these – fortunately, I do know that those who stick around to reach this far into the nonsense clearly have similar, if not worse issues, so we are free to go ahead – and feeding all these beasts and well, anybody for that matter became a serious challenge, and it had to be done accumulating debt.
Indeed, it is not fair to play the IIWFY game detailed in the psychology classic Games People Play by Eric Berne http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/09/g... a game which involves us blaming the consort for something we could not achieve, and the fact that we have two macaws is partly my choice (one was brought home by Throw Mama From The Train) and then we could all do this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
June 24, 2022
Highly enjoyed this read. Creeps me out to think of how things could be if war, inevitably broke out once more in Europe, especially during these times.
October 2, 2020
I have dusty fly-blown memories of seeing the apocalyptic closing episodes of luminary British screenwriter Troy Kennedy-Martin's 1983 TV adaptation of "The Old Men at the Zoo" and had always resolved to read Angus Wilson's novel when time allowed.
The world being what it is now, time finally allowed.
Wilson's 1961 novel seems in many ways to be a decidedly mannered precursor to the kinds of outrageous political satire which Lindsay Anderson would later go on to perfect in films such as "If..." and "Britannia Hospital" (in that he takes a classically British Institution - London Zoo in this case - and eviscerates its mores and corruption from the inside-out in order to make satirical points about the wider mien of British society as a whole), although it must be said, Wilson's vision of the then near-futuristic world of the early seventies is firmly rooted in the rigid strictures of an establishment which is still austerely dominated by the upper-middle classes, and as such is more in keeping with the world of "Carlton Browne of the F.O." than the turbulent socio-political milieu which would actually come to pass. Not that this should be taken as a criticism, because it's virtually impossible for any novelist to play Cassandra successfully, but it does lend the opening chapters with their snobbish asides, casual sexism, priggish administrators, dedicated club men, and deferential working class characters - a decidedly dated feel.
That said, the novel rattles along in its own decidedly compulsive and deeply strange way as it catalogues the various internecine feuds between the assorted directors, patrons, and curators of exhibits against a backdrop of an escalating war between the UK and a federated Europe (a plot device which feels bizarrely relevant again given the events of recent years), and Wilson succeeds in wrong-footing the reader with sudden explosions of profanity, casual brutality, and bizarre sexual peccadilloes on more than one occasion.
But where the novel really shines is in its evocation of the Zoo and its employees attempting to come to terms with the apocalyptic aftermath of the outbreak of war. Kennedy-Martin, in one of many changes, opted for a limited Nuclear conflagration in his TV adaptation; Wilson's original opts for a less devastating, but no less evocative, conventional attack. These chapters, in which even the architects of the country's "brave new world" find events seemingly running out of their control are beautifully rendered and pull the novel's sometimes disparate-seeming subplots and characters together into a masterfully orchestrated whole.
"The Old Men at the Zoo" is avowedly not or everyone, but, like R.C. Sheriff's The Hopkins Manuscript, for those who can engage with it, it transcends its shortcomings to become a weirdly mesmerizing evocation of a very English kind of Dystopia.
The world being what it is now, time finally allowed.
Wilson's 1961 novel seems in many ways to be a decidedly mannered precursor to the kinds of outrageous political satire which Lindsay Anderson would later go on to perfect in films such as "If..." and "Britannia Hospital" (in that he takes a classically British Institution - London Zoo in this case - and eviscerates its mores and corruption from the inside-out in order to make satirical points about the wider mien of British society as a whole), although it must be said, Wilson's vision of the then near-futuristic world of the early seventies is firmly rooted in the rigid strictures of an establishment which is still austerely dominated by the upper-middle classes, and as such is more in keeping with the world of "Carlton Browne of the F.O." than the turbulent socio-political milieu which would actually come to pass. Not that this should be taken as a criticism, because it's virtually impossible for any novelist to play Cassandra successfully, but it does lend the opening chapters with their snobbish asides, casual sexism, priggish administrators, dedicated club men, and deferential working class characters - a decidedly dated feel.
That said, the novel rattles along in its own decidedly compulsive and deeply strange way as it catalogues the various internecine feuds between the assorted directors, patrons, and curators of exhibits against a backdrop of an escalating war between the UK and a federated Europe (a plot device which feels bizarrely relevant again given the events of recent years), and Wilson succeeds in wrong-footing the reader with sudden explosions of profanity, casual brutality, and bizarre sexual peccadilloes on more than one occasion.
But where the novel really shines is in its evocation of the Zoo and its employees attempting to come to terms with the apocalyptic aftermath of the outbreak of war. Kennedy-Martin, in one of many changes, opted for a limited Nuclear conflagration in his TV adaptation; Wilson's original opts for a less devastating, but no less evocative, conventional attack. These chapters, in which even the architects of the country's "brave new world" find events seemingly running out of their control are beautifully rendered and pull the novel's sometimes disparate-seeming subplots and characters together into a masterfully orchestrated whole.
"The Old Men at the Zoo" is avowedly not or everyone, but, like R.C. Sheriff's The Hopkins Manuscript, for those who can engage with it, it transcends its shortcomings to become a weirdly mesmerizing evocation of a very English kind of Dystopia.
January 16, 2020
The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson is nothing like the 2011 movie, We Bought A Zoo. However, the struggle to keep and maintain a zoo afloat is similar.
This book tells a story about a secretary named Simon Carter who assumes the responsibility to take care of a failing zoo. The full story itself doesn’t involve any war except some kind of political fight, but the television adaption has wars. When the zoo animals escaped from their keepers as they were being transported because the management is no longer able to take care of them, the public thinks that something dangerous is coming. Well, that danger was being attacked by the escaped animals.
This book tells a story about a secretary named Simon Carter who assumes the responsibility to take care of a failing zoo. The full story itself doesn’t involve any war except some kind of political fight, but the television adaption has wars. When the zoo animals escaped from their keepers as they were being transported because the management is no longer able to take care of them, the public thinks that something dangerous is coming. Well, that danger was being attacked by the escaped animals.
October 27, 2024
What starts off as a conventionally written detailed and mildly amusing campus novel set in a zoo takes strange turns. If you're interested in this book I'd recommend not hunting down the premise and just jumping straight in, then you'll get the full effects of its twists. I could also have also given this 4 stars.
September 16, 2022
How to eat a van full of lemurs when you don't have food enough to feed the ones you can't eat straight away and other problems faced by a village in the Home Counties after an attack on the UK in 1973.
September 1, 2017
It was okay. Sort of took awhile to read. Worth a read still. May grow on me.
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