Mary Keen
We read Fry and Eliot in the Sixties, but I don't remember coming across much poe- tic drama since then. Craig Raine's The Electrification of the Soviet Union (Faber, £3.50) was commissioned as an opera by Glyndebourne. Even after reading the text I found it an inaccessible work, but although I thought the music patchy and difficult, refrains of poetry hung in my head long after the opera was over.
Memory must be a reliable indicator of enjoyment. The stamp of Craig Raine's verses on the mind is the antithesis of those forgettable novels which you read on holi- day. I thought Mary Wesley was a cut above the rest when I discovered The Camomile Lawn. This summer I read two, or was it three, of her other novels, including the latest, Not That Sort of Girl (Macmillan, £10.95). I cannot now remem- ber anything of their plots or characters. A faintly nasty taste of sensationalism lingers in the mind and I am resolved not to read Mary Wesley again.
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