Anthony Thwaite

Candia McWilliam’s first novel, A Case of Knives, won the Betty Trask Award last year. I expect I am wrong in persistently remembering this as a prize for something called Romantic Fiction; I believe I am right in thinking that the rubric was extended to include the words ‘or traditional’. The formidable young McWilliam doesn’t seem to me to fit comfortably under either label. A Case of Knives was a dazzling, burnished, stilt-walking stylistic exercise, like that of a very clever student who had been nourished on a forced diet of John Cleveland, George Barker (The Dead Seagull) and Craig Raine, and who had once heard the plot of a novel by Iris Murdoch. The novel’s characters were indeed Romantic, if by that one means fabulous, fanciful, whimsical, high-flown, etc, as under Roget 515: Lucas Salik, Anne Cowdenbeath, Cora Godfrey and the rest seemed precocious fictions, made palpable only by the finely-honed language in which they expressed themselves (‘Language is a case of knives’): ‘I was driven home by a man with no hands, my heart belonging to a man who was a mender of hearts, and within me was growing another heart, not mine at all, but never quite not mine. These grotesque anatomical tmeses touched my dreams through a thin sleep.’ Grotesque tmeses appeared to be what Candia McWilliam was good at.

The government department is deserted But all the lights are on. It lies below The pavement, rises up, a stump of glass, And all the lights are on, and no one there. It’s Friday night, at nine. And why indeed Should anyone be there? But all the lights are on.

Banks of computers sit there, room on room Frozen in rectangles of green on black; And here’s an office where two chairs...

In a long tape-recorded conversation she had with Kay Dick in November 1970 (the best source for the flavour of her speech), Stevie Smith remarked:

Alison Lurie’s new novel is, among other things, an anthology of several characters from her earlier novels. Readers unfamiliar with these books need not be apprehensive, however: The Truth about Lorin Jones is perfectly self-contained. Indeed, that self-contained quality helps to account for the powerful, painful oppressiveness of the book, as Polly Alter becomes more and more deeply enmeshed in her quest for the eponymous woman she is pursuing.