Good Read: Daughters of Albion by AN Wilson

Daughters of Albion is a curious installment in the Lampitt Chronicles series -- at least compared to its two predecessors. In it, the now divorced Julian Ramsay trips through the sixties in London. This is not so much the Swinging Sixties of Austin Powers, but the sixties of Labour governments and philosophical and critical innovation. The novel is a philosophical consideration more than a bildungsroman like the previous volumes in the Lampitt series.

As the novel begins, Ramsay’s friend Darnley has started a newspaper that seems to be a mix of gossip, radical culture and art. In introducing the paper to the narrative, Wilson introduces the character of Rice Robey aka Albion Pugh, a friend of Darnley’s and a contributor to the paper. The book opens at a literary luncheon at the Black Bottle, Julian’s former place of employment, and the conversation is somewhat dialectical, alternating between the Profumo Affair and an unorthodox Sunday newspaper piece by an Anglican bishop. We are in a London in which public officials consort with prostitutes (who consort with Soviets) and bishops who don’t believe in God. And the guardrails that keep society and culture on track are deemed outdated and useless.

Robey/Pugh is the central character is Daughters of Albion. The title is taken from a work by William Blake but in Wilson’s context it refers to the many, many women who are drawn to Robey in a sort of sexless eros. The character is almost too eccentric to be believable. He is a civil servant during the course of the novel, working for the Ministry of Works and seeking to preserve an ancient stone ring threatened by road works. He is a former schoolmaster who has written some enigmatic mysteries -- part Agatha Christie, part metaphysical speculation -- which were popular but are now largely disregarded.

While seducing co-workers and acquaintances with his ‘Buddha of Suburbia’ metaphysics, Robey/Pugh is at work on a religious epic, a verse biography of Jesus and/or Paul*. This narrative takes off on the apocryphal story of a visit to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea. In the Robey/Pugh version, Joseph is Jesus’ cousin and both he and Jesus visit Britain on a trading trip. William Blake haunts this novel as he did A Bottle in the Smoke, particularly his poem “Jerusalem” which posits such a visit by Christ. The poem is the basis for the lyrics to the hymn “Jerusalem” beloved of Anglicans and sung at every meeting of that most English of entities, the Women’s Institute.

In Robey/Pugh’s work, Paul (called Saulos) is also in Britain during Joseph and Jesus’ visit, and he is drawn to the numinous presence of the young Jesus. Both Saulos and Jesus witness a druidic human sacrifice, a sight that profoundly upsets Jesus. Later in the Robey/Pugh verse narrative, Saulos is complicit in and then witnesses the crucifixion -- likewise, he is present at the stoning of Stephen -- it is in fact he that throws the first stone. Throughout, Paul finds himself drawn to Jesus on a romantic and/or sexual level. His desire transmutes into metaphysical belief at his conversion.

Paul, like Julian, comes to believe that what is attractive about religion, perhaps even necessary to human happiness, is the mythical. Whether in the gospels or in the sanctity of ancient British sacrificial sites (of course, the site where Jesus witnesses the human sacrifice is exactly the site Rice Robey is hoping to save from the bulldozers) there is something lost in a world in which bishops lack a belief in God. As Robey puts it, “Each of us comes to fullness of life only when we have learnt how to mythologize it.”

Julian seems to come to concurrence with Robey. “That is, it matters far more how a person is perceived than what they are actually like… It was incontestable that Christianity… was something buzzing about in the mind of St. Paul. It was Paul’s perception of Jesus as a mythological being of cosmic importance which converted the members of the early church… It was precisely because St. Paul did not produce ‘facts’ which were capable of empirical discussion in the prosaic world of ‘Either/or’ that he was able to revolutionize the world.” (131-2).

Wilson has been quite famously an atheist until recently. He has returned to the Church of England and made quite a splash in the London Sunday papers and the New Statesman before Easter this year. You can sense some of Wilson’s sympathetic atheism in Daughters of Albion. He writes, “If I say that St. Paul imagined his theology, I mean that he created myths about Christ which were a response to his own profoundest psychological needs… and to which, for various reasons, many, many human beings have responded at the same deep level ever since.” (191)

So, for Julian, and for Wilson, there is something not quite believable but nonetheless necessary in the phantasmagoria of Albion Pugh’s visionary scribblings in his religious epic. He is a modern day Blake, drawing on biblical narrative for his own artistic and spiritual ends. He is also another man who seems to cuckold Julian at every turn. Julian wittingly ruins Robey’s career when he reveals that he is the source of the libelous gossip that Darnley prints in his underground paper. The libel trial brings the novel to its close.

Some of the critics say that Wilson is an uneven writer -- and I would agree in terms of this novel. It lacks the cohesion of Incline Our Hearts or A Bottle in the Smoke. Those two novels cover Julian’s childhood and adolescence, aspects of life that readers can identify with. The NY Times review of 1991 says that the characters’ identities are familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of underground London in the sixties. That’s not me! I’m still searching for some documentation of who is who and what is what in the Lampitt-sphere. Knowing more of that material would undoubtedly make this a more enjoyable read.

That said, Daughters of Albion gives an interesting and insightful account of the philosophical and intellectual currents that lead in sort order to postmodernism and narrative criticism. The fact that it uses Christianity as its central ‘text’ for these excursions is all the more compelling.

Next up: Hearing Voices