Less Than Angels

Less Than Angels is a brilliantly satirical novel set in a mixed community of established and fledgling anthropologists. Tom Mallow is a handsome, self-absorbed researcher who returns from the field to resume a casual domestic relationship with an independent and soft-hearted young journalist, Catherine Oliphant, but finds himself vacillating between Catherine and a fresher conquest, Deirdre Swan. This is a wry story of contrasts: between Deirdre’s romantic naivete and the practiced eye of Catherine, and between stodgy academics and young researchers. While gently satirizing those who study human behaviour—the conventional anthropologists, the Frenchman curious about the British, the Londoners amused by the villagers, and the retiree and the widow who analyze each other’s tea parties from a distance—Pym joins the fragments of romance, death, youth and disappointment into a rich and sparkling chronicle of human nature.