SOURCE: “Agonies and Anesthetics,” in Renascence, Vol. 10, No. 3, Spring, 1958, pp. 144-49.

In the following positive review of Thin Ice, Bowen deems the novel as an “extremely sympathetic history of an important homosexual in British public life written by a close family friend who is honest enough neither to deny nor to romanticize the most significant quality in his subject.”

To be a Catholic writer today is fashionable, a fact which has earned at times highly questionable laurels for writers familiar with the outward and visible signs of Catholic dogma and with the intellectualizing of the Church fathers. Few would-be modern Catholics have had either the courage or the insight to cope with that aspect of Catholic truth which distinguishes the Church from very nearly all other modern institutions, namely the consideration of death and its inevitable association with His agony. “Catholic” novels have offered the faith as a...