Set in a near future (the novel was first published in 1961 and is set in the period 1970-73), this is Angus Wilson's most allegorical novel, about a doomed attempt to set up a reserve for wild animals.
Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice of his gifts as a naturalist. But power is more than just the complicated game played by the old men at the zoo in the satirical first half of this novel: it lies very near to violence, and in the second half real life inexorably turns to fantasy - the fantasy of war.
This tense and at times brutal story offers the healing relationship between man and the natural world as a solution for the power dilemma.
- ISBN10 0586049029
- ISBN13 9780586049020
- Publish Date 13 December 1979 (first published 27 October 1961)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 16 August 1991
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Imprint HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 352
- Language English