Mortal Fools

By Martha Duffy

DAUGHTERS OF ALBION

by A.N. Wilson

Viking; 287 pages; $21

In the past 15 years, Britain's A.N. Wilson has built a formidable reputation as a prolific man of letters -- 11 novels, three biographies, essays, journalism. He is brilliant, brisk, funny and morally exacting. Daughters of Albion is the last volume of a trilogy produced, with the author's characteristic vigor, a book a year.

One suspects that a considerable understanding of the British intelligentsia is necessary for a true appreciation of these works. Just reading Iris Murdoch will not do. The story involves the Lampitt family, a large clan whose money springs from 18th century alehouses. "They're not really aristocrats," a character observes, "they're the intellectual aristocracy of England . . . one of the best things this country has ever produced."

Well, pity England. The Lampitts tend to be woolly leftists cultivating small gardens of scholarship and politics and dandling hangers-on like Julian Ramsay, the diffident narrator of all three books. In the first, Incline Our Hearts, Ramsay is a young man full of bright promise. In the second, A Bottle in the Smoke, reality, in the form of diminished hopes and a doomed marriage, sets in. By Daughters of Albion he is contemplating a book on -- guess who? -- the Lampitts.

Roiling these backwaters are two powerful, charismatic figures, Raphael Hunter, an outright scoundrel, and Albion Pugh, who is more of a chronic liar and gifted fabulist. Both men are effortlessly successful with women: Ramsay loses his wife to Hunter and a beloved cousin to Pugh. He envies Pugh's "capacity to mythologise existence . . . his charm and his whatever it was he had instead of genius."

It is a poignant confession of rue, and Ramsay would appear to be a classic sensitive narrator. But Wilson is up to something more, which gives the book considerable strength. Near the end, Ramsay betrays his best friend to, of all people, Raphael Hunter, with serious consequences. No one in the large cast escapes the author's stern moral gaze. Ramsay is last seen scheming, probably bootlessly, to pursue the latest young woman to fall in love with Albion Pugh.