Of the five new novels grouped here, only one, I think, breathes something of that 'air of reality (solidity of specification)' which seemed to Henry James 'the supreme virtue of a novel - the merit on which all its other merits ... helplessly and submissively depend'. Unfortunately, that one - Pat Barker's The Century's Daughter - is also a consciously 'working-class' fiction whose claim to reality-status might be found off-puttingly vehement. Still, her book, risking as it does a limiting categorisation and, inescapably, a caricaturing treatment of its subject, is the only one of the five which, making a serious attempt on reality, takes the reader completely seriously: the latter, in this instance, is never someone who is merely 'in on something', and his intelligence is never insulted. I don't want to call the book a masterpiece: it isn't that - but at least it is more a work of art than a disappearing act.

LRB 4 December 1986 | PDF Download