Bloody old England.(After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World)(Book Review)

A. N. Wilson After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 624 pages, $35

A. N. Wilson is one of Britain's most impressive, important, and versatile writers, the author of nineteen novels (including the superb five volumes of The Lampitt Chronicles), as well as fourteen works of non-fiction, among them biographies of Tolstoy, Milton, C. S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch, and St. Paul. He also writes penetrating and highly opinionated columns in the London Evening Standard and the Daily Telegraph, usually on intellectual themes. He is a man who must be taken seriously.

Like most highly intelligent people, Wilson doesn't stand on ceremony; he enjoys teasing, and he never thrusts his brilliance or scholarship down his readers' throats. His history of Britain's decline between the death of Queen Victoria and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II is therefore compulsively readable. Americans who take pleasure in the fact of Britain's collapse in power in the first half of the twentieth century will relish every page, not least because so much of that collapse is attributed to the deliberately anti-British policies of successive U.S. administrations, primarily those of FDR and Harry Truman.

Long before the United States appears as Britain's scheming nemesis, Wilson has painted a powerfully evocative portrait of British life as it was really lived. The author's sheer breadth of sympathies and interests is astonishing, and his views can be accepted as wise and accurate on virtually every single facet of British political, social, cultural, and intellectual life--except her relations with America and Americans. In this Wilson exhibits a failing common to all too many of his (and my) countrymen: the assumption that somehow the world in general and the United States in particular owe Britain a living.

The book opens with the accession of King Edward VII--"Edward the Caresser" as he was nicknamed--after the death of the Queen-Empress Victoria. The immediate clearing-out of his dead parents' effects from Windsor, Balmoral, and other royal palaces by the new king had more than a touch of the fanatical about it, as though he'd been waiting decades for the chance to erase the unhappy memories that such bric-a-brac evoked. "Alas!" the king's wife, Queen Alexandra, wrote to his sister Vicky, the dowager empress of Germany. "During my absence, Bertie has had all your beloved Mother's rooms dismantled and all her precious things removed."

That might serve as this book's template for Britain in the first half of the century. Everything precious that had been laboriously built up by the British since 1837--as chronicled in Wilson's last book, The Victorians--was in the process of being dismantled and removed by the time the Queen-Empress's great-great-granddaughter was crowned in Westminster Abbey in 1953. British greatness, sapped to the dregs by the exhaustion of fighting two world wars, was on the way out even before the Suez Crisis of 1956 italicized the new geopolitical truth.

There is a rumbustious new body of revisionist history in Britain today that argues that the country didn't in fact decline at all, and that because living standards improved hugely over the period, and because Britain is still one of the top five world economies, and because we were on the winning side of both world wars and escaped invasion, that she has nothing to complain of about her post-1900 experience. To set against that cheeriness is Evelyn Waugh's contention, made at the time of the death of King George VI, that his sixteen-year reign between 1936 and 1952 had been the most disastrous for Britain since that of King Stephen. Britain's Empire, prestige, financial balances, military security, and, worst of all, her self-confidence had all vanished (although that can scarcely be laid at the door of her good-natured, well-meaning king).