A House and its Heads

Christopher Ricks

• Setting the World on Fire by Angus Wilson
  Secker, 296 pp, £6.50, July 1980, ISBN 0 436 57604 X

An ambitious novel about ambition and ambitions, Setting the World on Fire is in two minds. It embodies the minds in two brothers, Piers Mosson and Tom Mosson: the one with his head in the clouds, fated to become a red-carpet knight of the theatre, sure of his direction and of his directing; the other, with his feet on the ground, ready, steady, and going to be a lawyer. Each has sense and sensibility but in different proportions. These proportions, antagonistic and complementary, are built into the great house, hard by Westminster Abbey, which is likely to be theirs or at least the elder brother’s: Tothill House, which was begun by the sober genius of the architect Pratt and was completed or wrested by the intoxicating genius of Vanbrugh. The loving rivalry of the brothers flashes and bickers in their championing the competing claims; Tom finds himself in the ordered regularity of Pratt’s handiwork, and so is nicknamed ‘Pratt’; Piers, whose identity exists to stage and shape that of others, finds his freedom from self in the dramatic energy of Vanbrugh, and so has the name nicked down to ‘Van’. The great house is sparsely populated by their great-grandfather, by his daughter-in-law (their grandmother), and by their pompous circumstantial uncle. Their widowed mother, brave and tearful and intermittent, threatens the decorum of it all. Behind the contrasting frames of mind and styles of architecture, there loom the twined ancient families: the Tothills, who had been flamboyant and had even perhaps figured in the heated antics of the Hell Fire Club, and the Mossons, whose fires had been securely banked.