Stage properties, the line-drawings at the head of each chapter, scenery, plot and theme of The Blue Hawk, all suggest a very early period of Egyptian culture, but this is not an historical novel. Peter Dickinson leaps still further from any actual historical starting-point than he did from Byzantium in The Dancing Bear. As in that book, he produces an illusion of authenticity while taking freedom to arrange events and choose characters as it suits him. At the same time, the associations with an exotic past that flock into the mind as we read cannot but add to our enjoyment of this complex, circling narrative. (p. 2811)

This is not the first story of the clash between tyranny and freedom of thought and it will not be the last, but it is certainly one of the most specific and compelling. Quotations from the texts prescribed by the priests for...