Caroline Moore
A Change of Climate (Viking, £15) is anoth- er excellent novel by Hilary Mantel, subtle as well as shocking. She writes of evil and the loss of faith, and is bleak, funny and intensely readable. Allan Massie's bio- graphical novel about Sir Walter Scott, The Ragged Lion (Hutchinson, £15.99) is subtle without being shocking. It is quiet, reflec- tive, yet achieves an extraordinarily power- ful undertow of emotion. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, devotedly edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mayhew (Yale, two volumes so far; next two out in December) were utterly captivating. They are miraculously fresh and extremely funny, a stream of flashing, twisting, living wit; though Stevenson's high courage is often dancing on the brink of the abyss of breakdown, illness and depression.
I am uneasy nominating 'worst' books, but Michael Crichton's Disclosure (Centu- ry, £14.99) is surely best-selling fair game. It is dull as well as badly written; the plot as well as the characters is inept. If I had not been reviewing, I would not have finished it.
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