FICTION

DAUGHTERS OF ALBION by A. N. Wilson (Viking: $21; 287 pp.) Although A. N. Wilson has written numerous novels, he’s probably best known as a biographer, most recently of Tolstoy. Few authors produce good work in both genres, but A. N. Wilson does, in part because he knows that the biographer is necessarily a mythologizer, that committing a life to paper is “a fixing of things that are fluid, a series of still photographs of moving objects.” Those are the words of Julian Ramsay, the narrator of Wilson’s most recent novel and himself a novice biographer who comes to learn that words can be as limiting as they are liberating. “Daughters of Albion” is an unfocused novel but what center it does have is provided by Albion Pugh, an eccentric William Blake-like writer whom Ramsay finds far preferable to colleague Raphael Hunter, Ramsay’s nemesis. Ramsay recognizes that Pugh, at bottom, is not a very good writer, but he admires his social, historical conscience and ability to inspire extraordinary loyalty among his acolytes (Albion’s daughters), a loyalty that Ramsay has been able to achieve only as a sometime radio actor. For a time it seems Ramsay will be forced to choose between becoming an obscure, bewitching writer like Pugh or a famous hack like Hunter, but that’s not the way the plot develops, Wilson apparently following his various set-pieces wherever they happen to lead. “Daughters of Albion” is an ambitious book, but frustrating for being both fragmentary and lacking in direction.