The Old Men at the Zoo

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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. 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 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… 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 book is so cleverly worked out, so detailed and so complex, that it is impossible to give more than a flavour here. But anyone interested in power games and the incompetent (rather than malicious) abuse of power and in the idea of freedom and how we all have responsibility for it and any Brit who still has doubts about the European Union would be well advised to read this first-class novel. Publishing history

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-03-29 03:10:19 Autocrop_version 0.0.9_books-20210916-0.1 Boxid IA40413314 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Falcon is at once more manly and more childish. He is a famous explorer, whose name is surely intended to recall that of Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Antarctic, perhaps the last of the pre-1914 storybook English heroes; yet his fixation on the past is not so much jingoism as sheer nostalgia for the nursery. He rechristens the Zoo’s prize elephant Jumbo, while on the eve of war he is engrossed in arranging a tableau of animals from children’s classics: Kipling, The Wind in the Willows, and so forth. He thinks of the public as a cheerful music-hall crowd; there is no place in his outlook for the mob violence which follows the destruction of his Victorian jamboree. Of all the characters in the book he is the one most plainly self-deluded, yet the fantastic preparations for his “British Day”—fireworks, multicolored fountains, patriotic recitations, emblematic flowerbeds—are described in elaborate and loving detail. Mr. Wilson has always reserved some of his sharpest darts for the soft underbelly of English culture, the whimsical, jocular, pet-loving, and sentimental side of the national character; but what stirs him to satire also exercises a lasting fascination. 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… The Old Men at the Zoo, a 1983 serial for BBC2 based on the novel by Angus Wilson, leaves the flashpoint unfashionably late. Although the threat of war is ever present the focus is very much on preparation, propaganda and domestic politics. Curiously, and rather more indicative of the age in which it was adapted, the nuclear bomb that arrives four fifths of the way through was not even present in the novel.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. Doctor Korczak and the Children, The July Plot, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) – Myth Versus Reality, Stalingrad, Underground, Wear a Very Big Hat, Peter Luke, James MacTaggart, Cedric Messina, Don Taylor. Updated in March 2022.

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. We often update posts with new information. Here are some of the biggest recent revisions with new research findings: A bizarre performance, which has disconcerted many of Mr. Wilson’s English admirers; I have already heard the book described as a burlesque of C. P. Snow, a veiled account of Munich, and a prolonged leg-pull. But Mr. Wilson isn’t the man to fob us off with a private joke, and even when his symbolism seems clumsily contrived it demands serious consideration. One thing is plain: he isn’t concerned with the futuristic aspects of his story. The treatment of politics is perfunctory, the details of warfare vague, the scattered references to social change almost deliberately inept. Mr. Wilson is no H. G. Wells; his theme is present-day England, which he sees lying at the mercy of unbalanced old men and increasingly cut off from reality. The officials and curators in the novel have lost all sense of proportion; after all, a zoo is an important institution, but it is no more the whole world than—shall we say?—a Cambridge college is. In the outside world terrible things are happening, but the old men go tottering to their graves wrapped up in private manias, jealous and pig-headed to the last. Each of the three directors averts his eyes from what he doesn’t want to see, and each suffers horribly as he is overtaken by events. 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... 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.'

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Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-02-17 12:01:23 Boxid IA40061818 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier urn:lcp:oldmenatzoo0000wils_s1v7:epub:0aa5c2c2-7453-4551-b85c-d34b4d6fea04 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier oldmenatzoo0000wils_s1v7 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7ds31f93 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0140020799 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 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… 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?