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improbable, but quite probable enough for me to read right through it wanting to know how things will happen. For his villain is so pitch black - so uncompromisingly wicked and horrible that one can be in no doubt about his end. He is a blackmailer, a murderer, and sexually (if nothing else) unbalanced. He is mean, greedy, a bully, a sadist and a coward, and he has a nasty little voice. He has, in fact, none of the charm often attributed to wicked people - from the devil to Cecily Cardew’s Algernon - and one does wonder a bit how he manages to pass the time when he is not actually engaged in the activities outlined above. It is no chance, I feel, that he spends his holiday fishing, which involves the same kind of isolation and fleeting contact with his victims.
    He is taking his ill-earned rest when the book starts, and does not know that he is being pursued by a journalist who has good personal reason to kill him. The reasons are then separately outlined from the point of view of the various victims, until, by the time we are back fishing with these two men, we are, so to speak, informed towards revenge. Mr Bingham is very good at his vignettes of people - one sees their lives stretching each side of the moments in which he presents them, and therefore, I should have liked a wider vision of his main character: but this would probable turn out to be a morbid request.

 
Four Voices
by
Isobel English
    March 1961
    Miss English is perhaps predominantly a writers’ writer, although this does not mean that she is not also a readers’ writer. But apart from the sine qua non of any good novelist - readability - she has a remarkably articulate sense of form, and writes with the mixture of concern and passionate attention to her detail together with those delicious little flights of what I can only call pure writing fancy which are seldom found in the greater bulk of readers’ writers. The four voices are none of them - as the readers’ writers would say - pinned down to professional or external life. They are more like those various, interesting objects found upon beaches after a shipwreck; clearly they have all had some use but one is not quite sure what it was: one picks them up and examines them with curiosity and faint nostalgia for the unknown heyday of their utility. There is Mona, a gigantic old drunk, who has been married and had one daughter who died, and now lives on a pittance with an aunt in Belgravia. Her one time husband, Penry, was once some kind of journalist, who has brought vagrancy and total irresponsibility for any of his wives or children to an art so fine that they all feel constantly in his debt. There is Elizabeth, an earlier wife of Penry’s, a Catholic convert with a son called Gervase, whose silliness and dishonesty become pathetic when she had to face losing him to the fourth voice Blanche, a young woman who has left a rich husband and small daughter to embark on marriage with a bloodless young man.
    Blanche is intelligent, vaguely literary, and with an emotional structure which is only spasmodically equal to her perceptions. Of these voices, who speak in random turn (Gervase neither deserves nor gets one), it is Mona who really wrings one’s heart - with her irrelevant clarities, her reckless vulgarity, her knowledge of the appearances which she is damned if she will keep up, and her understanding of the mutual dependence forged between herself and Penry by the indissoluble links of their different weaknesses. She reminded me in some ways of Joyce Carey’s Gully Jimpson in The Horse’s Mouth . Given that something which is both elegant and intricate can also have power, I think this is a powerful novel, and Miss English a very good writer indeed.
     
     
     

 
The Middle Tree
by
Joan O’Donovan
    March 1961
    This is Miss O’Donovan’s second novel, and unlike Miss English, she has made much good use of a professional background: what her characters are has a great deal to do with what they