"Less Than Angels" by Barbara Pym - book review

I really enjoy spending time in the world of Barbara Pym. This novel deliciously overlaps with Excellent Women. We find out what happened to Mildred and Everard Bone. There are also a few other minor characters that appear in both novels. Less Than Angels is about a group of anthropologists in London: undergraduates and more senior academics, and their wider families. I read this alongside Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads. They cross-pollinated: the end of the British empire; problematic attitudes towards Africa and its people; the slow shift of power. It also made me think of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and the different variety of relationships women and men have; suburban life and women's place in it. I really loved this book and want to keep reading more Pym. It doesn't matter that it's just a window into people's lives: there is still intrigue and joy to be found in the everyday and domestic; the awkwardness of a visitor sitting in the wrong pew in church, which "belongs" to a regular family; the politics of afternoon tea; the way women treat each other in a love triangle; the fecklessness of most of the men. I love that you sometimes catch sight of something major in passing, through another character's eyes, rather than directly through the people it's happening to (field notes on a bonfire). There's also something brutally comic about how one character reaches the end. More, please!