A night's inspired pub crawl

THIS is the fifth and last novel in A.N. Wilson's "Lampitt Chronicles". The title comes from its biblical epigraph: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.

The sentiment may seem contradictory for a project that has been described as "neo Proustian", and is most often compared to Anthony Powell's longer novel sequence "A Dance to the Music of Time". The comparison seems initially appropriate, but in fact Powell's project, as the word "dance" in its title indicates, is far more frivolous and lightweight than A.N. Wilson's.

It is perhaps a measure of Wilson's achievement that this work also bears comparison to Evelyn Waugh's trilogy. It is often as funny as Waugh, and has a more interesting sense of 20th century angst and a more compassionate view of its characters.

However, Wilson has a dance of his own, tip to a point, and in this final volume there is a fair amount of tying up of loose ends, including the marriages of four hitherto unlikely couples. But the writing, the interweaving of events from past and present, is so elegant and amusing and so skilful, that only on reflection does one realise how much tidying up has taken place.

Wilson's treatment of time has a foreshortening effect, so that events which took place over a long period are suddenly looked at in a new context by being pulled together in the narrator's mind. The main action of the book takes place in the course of one night's drinking, which in any other hands would be a dire prospect. But for Wilson, the pub crawl is an inspired way of connecting up a wide assortment of characters and memories.

The organising principle comes from one of the narrator's many apercus: "Each of us, enjoying star billing in our own inner drama, has been cast, unknown to ourselves, as a very minor walk on in the lives of others." Thus, when narrator Julian Ramsay, an actor and a passionate admirer of Shakespeare, is dragged unwillingly to a meeting of fascists in the back room of a seedy pub, he recognises a Mr Smethurst. Julian and Smethurst have met before, and suddenly the reader is transported to Venice in February 10 years earlier, and a dinner party attended by Smethurst, hosted by the French family with which Julian stayed as an adolescent language student. Here he first meets Victoria, a Lampitt in whose house he is living when he re meets Smethurst.

For all the care taken to ensure that new readers are aware of the relations between various characters, there are so many of them that an alphabetical list for quick identification would have been appreciated. But in the end, it is not the characters themselves, eccentric and wonderfully drawn as they are, that intrigue and satisfy, so much as the world view that Julian acquires as he sifts through his memories and solves long standing mysteries.

But this is to make Wilson sound deadly serious; the other great pleasure of the novel lies in his comic descriptive powers and his (or rather Julian's) lively prose style. One would expect A.N. Wilson, himself a literary editor, to be sharp on the London literary scene, but he is equally good at describing a downmarket haunt of lager louts, or a pilgrimage procession at Walsingham. He is erudite without being overbearing, and his ingenious similes (one combines Poussin with Enid Blyton) make you laugh out loud.