Angus Wilson published three very successful collections of short stories, all in the early part of his career. The wrong set (1949) was his first published fiction, and Such darling dodos followed it in 1950. After a couple of novels, the third collection, A bit off the map, came out in 1957. This collected edition, compiled a few years before his death, also includes one previously uncollected story, "The eyes of the peacock," from 1980. So this isn't really a "whole career" overview, as Collected Stories often are: they are Wilson doing one particular kind of thing in numerous subtly different ways, but without much obvious evolution.

The stories are usually set in that interesting grey area of the English class system where the shadier members of the upper middle classes on their way down (into scandal, bankruptcy, or fatuous incompetence) meet the more ambitious members of the lower middle classes on their way up, often in a cloud of mutual contempt and misunderstanding. The decaying ex-officers and clergymen's daughters in their Kensington private hotels or economical country cottages see the ambitious young grammar-school careerists as brash and vulgar, and are in turn seen as arrogant and irrelevant. The settings are almost invariably English: even when they venture outside England they remain in islands of Englishness, like 1930s Natal or holiday hotels in France and Italy. The only really "foreign" location is a windswept Scottish university town.

As usual, Wilson is marvellous at finding a precise social indicator in a sentence or less:
"She accepted her position as an old maid with the cheerful good humour and occasional irony that are essential to English spinsters since the deification of Jane Austen, or more sacredly Miss Austen, by the upper-middle classes..."
"He could be so nice when he forgot for a moment that he'd worked his way up from the bottom."
"...said Constance, spreading the fish-paste more thickly than she would have done for persons of her own class..."

(The mockery of Janeolatry is a recurrent theme, by the way — he doesn't seem to have anything against Jane Austen herself, but he is ruthless in his jabs at the people who use her as a shortcut to defining their own Englishness.)

Most of the fun is in the awkwardness of the social confrontations as it works itself out in elegantly barbed dialogue. The stories themselves tend to be fairly static, with a sudden twist on the last page as a character is arbitrarily killed off or a previously unspoken truth is brought out into the open. A couple of times there is an unexpected shift of perspective that forces us to go back and re-examine what we've just read in a new light, but that's exceptional. Usually we know where we're headed and we can enjoy the manoeuvres Wilson makes to get us there.

There's a lot to enjoy here. I think my favourite this time around was the story "More friend than lodger" from A bit off the map. A young woman of nouveau-riche background manages to have her cake and eat it when her stuffy publisher husband takes up with an "exciting new author," whom she recognises as an obvious con-man but allows to "seduce" her anyway. But the title story of Such darling dodos was marvellous as well: a reactionary old Roman Catholic queen is surprised and delighted to discover that he is much more in tune with the political spirit of post-war North Oxford than his Fabian sister and brother-in-law, who were so tiresomely trendy all the way through the thirties. ( )