Wilson expresses the problem of the contemporary novelist in a striking question: "How can we combine caring with shaping?" The remarkable feature of his own career as a writer has been the way in which, despite the nihilistic tendencies of the age, Wilson has retained his care for humanity while enriching the formal elements of his work—though the formal complexity of the early works is often under-estimated…. Wilson agrees with the suggestion that his later novels reveal a less solid world than the earlier ones, relating this to his growing sense of the fragility of our civilisation. Some people, like Wilson's central characters, try to come to an understanding of the situation, but many avoid the issue and play "louder and louder games to disguise from themselves the earthquake surface on which we all live". Again we are made aware of the serious concern for humanity at...