Sir: Discussing the 'Best Novels of Our Time' business, Paul
Johnson ('Literary sil- ly season', 12 November) asks rhetorically, 'Who but Miss Howard would have selected Elizabeth Taylor's little-known Angel?' Well I would, for one.
The chief reason why Angel is little known, if it is (can Mr Johnson really hold this against it?), is that it is not the sort of book that gets talked about by most of the people who regard themselves as educated readers. To them it sounds or would sound rather ordinary. Of course if you have no literary judgment, no ability to see a novel as it really is, you spend your time groping for guidelines like what reviewers have said or might say about it, what class it seems to fall into, where it seems to be aiming, whether its style strikes you as normal or not, above all whether it can be called important or not — which is far easier to decide than whether the thing is any good or not.
On these counts Angel makes a pretty poor showing. Nobody could ever call it rumbustious, or searing, or daringly in- novative, or linguistically brilliant, or life- affirming, or Sophoclean, or wry. In paraphrase, and many readers get little fur- ther with any novel than their own paraphrase, Angel sounds low-key, perhaps sentimental, feminine in the derogatory sense, even women's-magaziney. But (what can I say?) read properly it stands out as a powerful story about a violent and hysterical egotist, a character deeply seen
into and judged with scrupulous fairness, all done with triumphant narrative skill, a wonderful eye and ear and unfailing humour, though not of the 'robust' nor of the 'savage' variety, often delightfully catty. If some of these qualities have a familiar ring to them it is not because they are two a penny in the novels of our time or any other.
Elizabeth Taylor herself gave her status no help by having no public life, not being seen on television, not pronouncing on the state of the world and not going round ex- plaining that her underlying subject was the crisis of the bourgeois conscience. It was hard to believe that this rather ungregarious wife of a businessman living in no great style in the Thames valley, fond of a gossip over a gin and tonic, could be the author of any kind of novel, let alone an important one. And Angel is not important in the usual sense: it inaugurated nothing, summ- ed up nothing, did nothing outside itself. But importance isn't important. Good writing is.
Kingsley Amis
c/o Jonathan Clowes, 22, Prince Albert Road, London NW I
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