This is a dense, complex, rich and energetic book, demanding more than one reading. It is partly a portrait of middle-class England from 1912 to 1967. Some detailed and loving topical allusions to the social and political folklore of its epoch would benefit from footnotes. During this half-century, moreover, each of the six Matthews children, who are the book's major characters, undergoes numerous changes. As soon as we begin to feel we know where we are – or what the author's apparent commitment to any one character is – the perspective shifts. The book is deliberately, brilliantly and disquietingly polyphonic. It is finally no accident that Margaret Matthews, the novel's novelist and part-double for Wilson himself, is last heard of in relation to a novel she has written about schizophrenia: No Laughing Matter is full of play about the degree of unity and of division that the late-twentieth-century novel and psyche alike may exhibit. It is a novel obsessed with doubleness. It is, too, a book in which Wilson further analyses his own art, and himself.

The book is big enough to bear different readings: any account is certain to be selective. Many critics belabour the book's formal play and boast about how excitingly alienated this makes them feel, while omitting to point out that, together with questionings of the nature of identity and of aesthetic truth, the novel is also elaborately and cunningly plotted, and reliably told. The novel's own playful internal schizophrenia has received more attention than its equally deliberate coherences. Both the protean and playful narrative and dramatic styles it experiments with, and Wilson's scrupulous ‘randomization’ of its surface texture, may conceal that this book is also constructed with an elaborate and hidden care, and is throughout cunningly shaped and patterned.

Wilson employs his usual talent for inventive symmetry throughout, so that each of its five Books has its own mode of internal coherence and he has, Joyce-like, invented for most sections an individual unifying device.

Book One, ‘Before the War’, is set during one day at the 1912 Wild West Exhibition in Earls Court, where we are introduced to the Matthews parents and their six children.