Francis King
I greatly enjoyed Elizabeth Jenkins's The Shadow and the Light: A Defence of Daniel Dunglas Home, the Medium (Hamish Hamilton) a work with all the excitement of a first-rate novel, even if with little of the impartiality of a first-rate biography. Even more I enjoyed Browning's Mr Sludge the Medium, to which it sent me back, and so the Complete Works, which I hoped would act as a literary Mogadon for my chronic in- somnia but which proved to be a literary amphetamine. The novel which is still embedded in my memory, a small diamond, when so many others have thinned to wraiths, is Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills (Faber), a first work, written by a young Japanese in English. When so many
writers failed in their deliberate attempts to make me laugh, I must applaud Philip
Snow's presumably unintentional success in doing so with his Stranger and Brother: A Portrait of C. P. Snow (Macmillan). Not even Evelyn Waugh ever created a character more richly comic.
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