I don't think I was quite prepared for Less than Angels, coming quite late in my Pym education. It is certainly classic Barbara Pym, with its disarming changes of perspective, its ironic and fierce (but rarely judgmental) observations of everyday figures, and its moments of heightened absurdity, here the anthropologist performing ritual dances in an African mask in an otherwise calm English suburb.

By focusing on the young (but, of course, Pym was hardly old when she wrote this novel), the author transmutes her usual world weary melancholy into a great sense of uncertainty: young people for whom it is still possible the world might yield up all of its cornucopia of treasures... even as we're aware that the middle-aged characters in the story have settled into their routines, half complacent and half unsatisfied.

There isn't really a central character here; Tom Mallow, he of the grey eyes and aristocratic bearing, seems like the most likely candidate, but we end up spending most of our time with Deirdre and Catherine, his two paramours. They both deliver in their own ways, especially when caught off-guard by a plot twist late in the novel that may be unique among Pym's works. The world here is again one of quietly Anglican lives and of the secular anthropologist, desperate for a grant equal to their intellectual talents but usually disappointed.

I suspect at this stage in my life I prefer Pym's more evidently amusing novels: Jane and Prudence, Some Tame Gazelle, Crampton Hodnet among them. But Less than Angels intrigues in its own way as a study of melancholy, and rewards with its cavalcade of characters attempting to follow etiquette but often grievously aware that others around them are taking liberties. Classic Pym in many ways. ( )

Pym observes the observers in this novel populated mostly by anthropologists and anthropology students. Tom Mallow returns from two years of field work in Africa to finish writing his thesis. He resumes his live-in relationship with writer Catherine, only to soon take up with first-year student Deirdre.

This book raises the question of who is better equipped to observe and describe human nature – the anthropologist or the fiction writer? (Advantage: fiction writer. It’s obvious that Catherine understands Tom and his behavior better than Tom understands himself!) Pym gives several nods to her earlier novel, Excellent Women, with the reappearance of Esther Clovis and repeated mentions of Everard Bone and his wife Mildred. At a point of crisis, Catherine reflects that “I’m not one of those excellent women, who can just go home and eat a boiled egg and make a cup of tea and be very splendid…but how useful it would be if I were!” ( )

Another deceptively ordinary story of women and their "little" lives. So engrossing, so amusing, sometimes so profound. In this novel Pym gives us the academic world of anthropologists home from their field work, or preparing to go back to it, or hoping to get a grant to begin it....and the family/staff/girlfriends around the edges who seem to have a very foggy notion of what it's all about. As in every other Pym I've read, there were one or two scenes that crept up on me and hit me in the funny bone, making me laugh out loud when I least expected it. Pym also has a trick of making me sympathize in the end with a character she seemed to be setting up as the villain of the piece earlier on. And it's all so subtle.
Read and reviewed in 2013 ( )

Perhaps too many characters to slip as easily into as most of Miss Pym's novels, and not enough of that coziness and parochial paraphernalia that makes her so enjoyable, but on the whole very passable. ( )

Well, that wasn't terribly interesting. The ending was a bit of a let down, but at least it saved all of Tom's women friends from further involvement with such a useless man. The internalized misogyny was rampant and all the observations about human nature were coloured with that lens. The older academic without a solid grasp on securing funding was exasperatingly believable.

Probably won't be picking up another Pym. ( )