Vol. 16 No. 19 · 6 October 1994
page 15 | 2428 words
Exceptionally Wonderful Book
John Sutherland
- Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh
Green Bay in association with Colt, 268 pp, £14.99, July 1994, ISBN 0 948845 05 8
The most valuable prize ever awarded for a work of fiction was the $150,000 put up by Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1948 for Ross Lockridge’s epic of the American Civil War, Raintree County. The prizegiver’s motive in setting up this award was venal. They wanted to spawn a blockbuster series of ‘books of the film’ in the manner of Gone with the Wind. The longer-term aim was to out-spectacle TV and force the pesky new medium to ‘crawl back into its tube’. It all went wrong. The 1957 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the narrative. Lockridge was so depressed by the scorn that the prize brought him that he killed himself the same year. Film, novel and prize are all forgotten. TV won.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 20 · 20 October 1994
From Anne Stevenson
John Sutherland’s exceptionally nasty review of Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels (LRB, 6 October) condescends to nearly everyone concerned with the Booker selection: to the judges, to Martyn Goff, to the British reading public, to Ms Walsh’s publicity and literary agents, to writers of children’s books, to American taste in fiction and, of course, to the novelist herself. But why is Professor Sutherland more to be trusted than the Booker judges? And why expend so many words attacking Mrs Walsh’s attractive novel while sparing others on the list? Are we supposed to be too grown-up these days to enjoy romantic parables? Or does this reviewer believe that to be of our time we should instead endorse ‘adult’ novels more committed to show-off voyeurism and squirming flesh?
Anne Stevenson
Grantchester, Cambridge
Vol. 16 No. 21 · 10 November 1994
From Jill Paton Walsh
Your reviewer of my book Knowledge of Angels (LRB, 6 October) says that ‘the reviewing world did not simply overlook Knowledge of Angels, they chose to overlook it’: rightly in his opinion. Knowledge of Angels was reviewed in the Times, the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Express, the Daily Telegraph, Scotland on Sunday and the Tablet. All these reviews were favourable. It was reviewed, with some reservations, in the Independent and the TLS. Your reviewer has now expended a whole page of your journal in slating it. I do not regard my book as having been ‘overlooked’: rightly or otherwise.
Jill Paton Walsh
Cambridge
From Ann Thwaite
John Sutherland has had some fun at the expense of Jill Paton Walsh. He tells a good story with only a few slips on the way. (It was Gaffer Samson’s Luck not Lunch that won the Smarties Prize in 1985, not 1984.) But it is as absurd to call Knowledge of Angels ‘Blytonish’ as it would be to bracket Mrs Humphry Ward with Elinor Glyn – just because they both wrote for adults. And does he really believe that a publicity agent, however wily, can engineer one of those coveted places on the Booker shortlist? I certainly don’t.
Ann Thwaite
Low Tharston, Norfolk
