September 1960
This author, who has proved herself - among other capabilities - to be a novelist of considerable range, has here attempted an idea the details of which all seem to be in place, but which as a whole strikes one more as an interesting experiment than a successful achievement. In a sense, it seems a little like an amateur’s brilliant idea for a novel, most professionally carried out.
A boy standing on a bridge in Limerick discovers that he does not know why he is there, where ‘there’ is, or even what he is called. A lift in a car takes him twelve miles to a village called Drumnair, which he not only knows - although he is sure that he has never been there - but where he also seems to be known, and where the effect that he has on a number of people is as violent as it is various. For two days he lives in a kind of enchanted dream of cognition without memory: he falls deeply in love and discovers easily something which had seemed irretrievably lost, but his identity is all the time catching up with him, and eventually invades his two days’ life.
There are curious layers in this book - a fairy tale element, but not quite the urbane simplicity required by that medium; a good deal of Catholic activity of the practised and practical kind; the outworn splendours and eccentricities of a large decaying country house - furnished and inhabited by Irish who seem to have direct literary affinity with their Russian nineteenth-century counterparts, and finally those acute, almost photographic, touches of contemporary English life at which so many good novelists, including Miss Frankau, excel. They all go to form a most readable novel which makes up in pattern what it seemed to me to lack in complete formal success.