"Revolution is revolution", Leon Trotsky noted in his autobiography, "only because it reduces all contradictions to the alternative of life or death". And so Gordon Saunders, the haunted "summer-time rebel" of Down the Long Table, emerges as a failed revolutionary, unable to accept the ultimate implications of his evolving commitments…. [The] novel forces each reader to challenge his or her own abilities to understand—and withstand—the social forces wrenching us away from our own places and lovers, dissociating both from our individual minds and wills….

Birney's novel brings together forty years by posing two related questions: what is the cost of emotional integrity, and what is the price of intellectual honesty? In the answers lies one of the particular strengths of Down the Long Table.

Gordon Saunders, the questing, questioning, naive and anguished academic is the centre of it all: a success at the opening and closing...