Britain in ‘Our Times’

A.N. Wilson has always been a hard one to pin downpolitically, at least if the pins and boards come off the shelf at the Wal-Martof ready-made ideas. In recent years the award-winning British biographer hasturned his attention to interpreting the history of his island kingdom from thepost-Napoleonic through the post-modern. His latest installment, Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) will probably be his last. After all, the thesisof Our Times is that Britain hasceased to exist in any meaningful way. The empire has been reduced to a compactpolitical entity, poised uncertainly between its role as client of the United States and the prospect of becoming aprovince of Europe.

As Wilson showsthroughout Our Times, the United Kingdom of 1952 when Elizabeth assumed the throne and the nationof nowadays are “utterly different.” The Britain of 1952 was damp andwithout central heating. Poverty was widespread, indoor toilets rare in manyneighborhoods, food was rationed and the country was bankrupted by thedeliberate policy of the United Statespracticallya condition for America’said in World War II, according to Wilson.Since those gray years, living standards have climbed skyward, homosexualityhas been legalized, unhappy marriages can be ended without the humiliatingcharade of private detectives documenting adultery, censorship of literaturehas been lifted, capital punishment abolished and equal wages for womenguaranteed.

Wilsonrecords all this and calls it good, and yet anxiety gnaws at the sinews of hisoptimism. “It would be a bold person who stood up and said that the reign of Elizabeth has been Britain’s most glorious period,” hewrites. “During those years, Britaineffectively stopped being British.”

Like Ray Davies in countless Kinks songs, Wilson bemoans the wave of immigration that threatens tosubsume the British, the Americanization that has chipped away at the island’sdistinct culture and the nationalist movements that threaten to peel the Celticoutlands away from London’scontrol. He bemoans the weakened power of the House of Lords, the one body tothwart Margaret Thatcher, and the virtual disestablishment of the Church ofEngland, a dubious institution that nevertheless provided the nation with aportion of its self-identity. In writing and music, Evelyn Waugh and BenjaminBritten have given way to the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Posh Spice. Thetabloid exposure of the private lives of public figures meant that only glibnonentities such as Tony Blair would dare enter politics.

Wilsonattacks Labour, Tory and Liberal alike, and don’t get him started on suchfashionable thinkers as Michel Foucault. While always engaging, he isn’t alwayson target. Decrying the cultural homogenization spurred by rock music, he failsto hear the extent to which the British reinvented this most American form ofmusic in the ’60s. Occasionally his facts are wrong. The Beatles didn’t“pompously” return their MBEsJohn Lennon was the lone anti-establishmentarianamong them. Wilsonnurtures a curious hatred of the Beatles and much prefers the Rolling Stones,considering them “way more English” and Jagger’s persona as “all reversions toLord Byron.”

Integral to his theme that England is nomore is an examination of the many consequences of pluralism in a society thatwas once largely monolithic. Wilsoncan only conclude that the changes that overtook the increasingly disunitedkingdom have been a mixed lot, leaving him at once nostalgic and happy to saygoodbye to all that was wrong.