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No Laughing Matter

Angus Wilson
€19.99
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A01=Angus Wilson
Author_Angus Wilson
Category=FBA
Class
Dysfunction
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eq_fiction
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Families

Product details

  • ISBN 9780571243297
  • Weight: 500g
  • Dimensions: 126 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 29 May 2008
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

A panoramic novel that stretches from 1912 to 1967 No Laughing Matter is perhaps Angus Wilson's most autobiographical novel.

The novel chronicles the end of the bourgeois way of life as seen through the lives of the six Matthews children and their dysfuntional middle-class family. Their parents - Billy Pop and the Countess - are objects of ridicule to their children who vow never to make their mistakes.

Quentin, the eldest, is a socialist who adores women. His fervent views, however, become distilled over the years until he transforms into a cynical TV pundit. Gladys, plump and amenable, is unlucky in love and eventually falls for the charms of a crook. Rupert, the handsome actor, has a successful career until he fails to adapt to the changing theatre. Margaret is a brilliant and highly acclaimed novelist but she becomes bitter as her twin Sukey sinks into domestic bliss, while Marcus, the baby of the family, believes that his career is his life.

An ambitious and enriching novel No Laughing Matter is an extraordinary work in its depictions of complex family relationships, where it is just as easy to hate as to love and where everyone struggles to be an individual.
About Angus Wilson
Sir Angus Wilson CBE was born in Bexhill, Sussex, in 1913, the youngest of six boys, and grew up in a series of residential hotels after his family ran through their inheritance. After Westminster School and Oxford University, he joined the British Museum Library. In World War II, he worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, where the stress caused a breakdown and he took up writing as therapy. After the war, he returned to the British Museum and replaced 300,000 books that had been destroyed. Following the success of his second novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), he gave up his job to dedicate time to writing. Homosexuality was still illegal, yet Wilson always wrote freely about his world; some libraries refused to stock his novels. Wilson became a Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 1978, and jointly with Malcolm Bradbury, established their ground-breaking MA in Creative Writing in 1970. He always insisted that his life companion Tony Garrett was acknowledged as his partner (Garrett was fired from his job as a probation officer). He and Tony left England for France in 1985, but Wilson's illness forced their return. The Royal Literary Fund supported Wilson in his final years. He died in 1991.

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