Frank Kermode

Anyone presuming to review works of modern literary theory must expect to be depressed by an encounter with large quantities of deformed prose. The great ones began it, and aspiring theorists usually carry their heads grotesquely to one side in emulation of these models. What begins as servile mimicry soon becomes a pathological condition. It is a relief that two of the present five books may be pronounced orthopaedically sound.

Having followed Shaw on a largely unsuccessful pursuit of love in Volume I, Mr Holroyd in his second instalment sets him off on what turns out to be an equally frustrated pursuit of power. It may seem curious that we are being asked to regard a man of such dazzling achievement as repeatedly failing in his aims, and at this stage we can only speculate about what he will be pursuing and not catching up with in Volume III. However that may be, Mr Holroyd regards the quest for power as his subject’s principal activity and ‘growing obsession’ during what might be thought, and is so named by the blurb, his prime, from 1898 to 1918 – that is, from his early forties to his early sixties.’

Barbara Everett’s book consists of her four Northcliffe Lectures, given at University College London in 1988, on Hamlet and the other ‘major’ tragedies, together with a number of shorter pieces on Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Twelfth Night, and quite a lot more about Hamlet. This account may make the book sound scrappy, but it holds together. Its chief hero Hamlet keeps returning to the scene like a reassuring leitmotif, and there are other compensating virtues. Ms Everett is, as always, discursive, and as always ready to take any promising detour – a habit which, though occasionally exasperating, reinforces one’s sense of her independence and her confidence. We are told that the whole business of criticism, not excluding Shakespearian criticism, has been changed utterly in the last few years, but you would never guess it from Everett’s writing, which is distinctive without excessive straining for novelty: this presumably goes to show that it is more interesting to do criticism than to argue about what criticism ought to do, and to what. She will worry away at a word – for example, ‘success’ in Macbeth – with as much determination as a deconstructor in search of an aporia, but she is always trying for solutions, however complex, rather than merely detecting problems, and although success, in the old sense of what’s going to come next, is frequently in doubt, there is no doubt that this is, in a more modern sense, a highly successful performance.’

‘The immediate past can frequently seem very distant and very alien; that strangeness can only be perceived through the medium of the present.’ Thus Bryan Appleyard, conscious of the difficulty of his project, which is to sketch the history of British art in the post-war years.

About a century ago Henry James remarked sadly that, unlike the French, the English novel was not discutable. It had no theory behind it. Its practitioners were largely unaware that ‘there is no limit’ to what the novelist ‘may attempt as an executant – no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes’. A new novel by Julian Barnes is a reminder that – up to a point, anyway – the situation has changed. Without being defiantly weird or consciously trying to alter the future, Barnes is clearly no slave to limit; he does something different every time, and if he were French and not just Francophile, his textes, as they say, might be called recherches. On the other hand, he has an English modesty about Theory, and though he does here and there drop a demure hint that matters of that sort are not absent from his mind, he leaves his readers to work them out as they choose.’