Philip Glazebrook
Reading a book aloud surely tests it in every particular, and the least flawed book I've read this year (silently or aloud) has been Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner. An adventure story without longueurs, its pace is brisk, its narrative enthralling, its charac- ters unforgettable and its dialogue comfort- ably pronounceable: a tale of Dorset smuggling in a class with Masefield's Jim Davis. Read them aloud to anyone aged nine to 90.
By the same stringent test of nightly readings The Willows in Winter by William Horwood is a pretentious failure. Unman- ageably verbose, clumsy, lacking dramatic structure, it is an aimless sesquipedalian ramble which never comes near Kenneth Grahame's territory and is enlivened only by Patrick Benson's fine illustrations. Read it to no one. It's not the worst book I've read to myself this year — that award is shared between Sir George Otto Trevelyan's Cawnpore and Edmund Blun- den's Leigh Hunt — but the one most markedly destroyed by reading it out loud.
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