Besides being an author, Barbara Pym worked with the International African Institute in London, where she worked closely with anthropologists, who turn up with great frequency in her novels. In LESS THAN ANGELS she turns her attention almost completely over to a group of anthropology students and professors and their aides working at an unnamed university in London; the result is one of her very best novels, and certainly her funniest. As frequently happens with Pym's works, there is no clear protagonist in this work; almost everyone engages our sympathies but very differently. Most of the characters seem to be in orbit in one way or another around Tom Mallow, a charismatic son of privilege who has left his landed family to work on his dissertation, and Professor Felix Mainwaring, a distinguished anthropology professor who has managed to charm a wealthy widow into giving his department the promise of quite a lot of money. Most of the novel is superficially about the competition among various women in Tom's life for his romantic attentions, and that among the students to get one of the fellowships Professor Mainwaring dangles before them, but really it's a kind of anthropological study in itself of a very highly educated and polite group of people who seem on their way out as a dominant social force in London. (The novel is filled with references to its nineteenth-century antecedents in Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, and also shows us at odd moments the potential for the great social changes unleashed in London in the twentieth century in the form of non-European immigrants and of enthusiasts for alternative political ideologies such as international communism.)
Pym's exceptionally dry humor is quite evident throughout, and I genuinely laughed out loud at several sections (particularly at the weekend retreat Professor Mainwaring arranges for his fellowship applicants at his country estate, which has one of the funniest outcomes in fiction I can remember). What might be more subtle is the author's extraordinary craft at manipulating her characters and her situations. This is one of the most deftly constructed novels I've read in quite some time.
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 2, 2021