[James Hanley] is an example of a novelist who has often aimed at a poetic type of fiction, restricting the social range of his work in his quest for intensity and significant form. He has undoubtedly pursued his art with dedication and integrity, and although he has elicited few displays of enthusiastic acclaim he has rightly won a great deal of respect for his artistic purity. Of his two books recently published, the reissued The Welsh Sonata (1954) is much more conspicuously poetic than the less ambitious and less pretentious A Kingdom, but despite being more conventionally realistic this new novel also strives towards the poetic. Neither novel contains much in the way of narrative, but The Welsh Sonata is more extreme in this respect…. As the title indicates, the structure of the book is analogous to the three-movement form of the classical sonata, and the subtitle Variations on a Theme provides another clue to its quasi-musical organisation. Like Virginia Woolf in The Waves, for example, Hanley is attempting to do what Forster in Aspects of the Novel regarded as an impossibility—making the novel aspire to the condition of music. Different as [the village] Cilgyn is from Dylan Thomas's Llareggub in many ways, it resembles it in being a symbolic and non-naturalistic version of a Welsh village. Despite some twentieth-century features, Hanley's imaginary world possesses an air of timelessness like Llareggub and the locales of T. F. Powys's work; the action, unlike that of A Kingdom, cannot be located in time. If T. F. Powys is one possible influence on Hanley, the surrealist-tinged Welsh gothicism of some of Dylan Thomas's and Glyn Jones's stories is surely another. Yet Hanley's style is his own, and as is invariably the case with self-consciously poetic novels, it is the most distinctive feature of the book. There are passages in which the Old Testament rhythms of the King James Bible dominate, passages in which every sentence begins with 'And', and passages in which sentences are an accumulation of statements linked by 'and'. A very elliptical syntax is frequently employed so that normal sentence structures are avoided. Subordinate clauses, participial phrases or even single words form paragraphs, and some pages look like blank verse since every phrase is paragraphed separately. The Welsh Sonata is a stylistic tour de force, but Hanley's preoccupation with the poetry of fiction turns out, as it usually does, to be self-defeating. As in the case of some of Virginia Woolf's mature novels, so much has to be sacrificed for the "poetry" that the gains do not outweigh the losses….
A Kingdom is less stylised and mannered than The Welsh Sonata, but again very little happens. The novel, set mainly in a remote Welsh smallholding, deals with the encounter between two sisters, Lucy and Cadi, in the days between their father's death and his funeral…. What interests [Hanley] are the psychological tensions, emotional nuances, and feelings of anxiety, hostility and guilt arising from the reunion of the sisters after many years of non-communication, and the first meeting of Cadi and her brother-in-law. He explores the apparently undramatic lives of this trio, bringing out the delicate shifts of attitude and the growing understanding that occur in the days before the funeral. It is subtle, restrained, carefully shaded and Jamesian, and yet—there's the rub—it is not Jamesian enough. For many writers, the material of A Kingdom would have made a long short story, but not a novel. Mutatis mutandis, one can imagine Chekhov handling it as a story. In concentrating on a small family group in an isolated house during a short period of time, Hanley is relinquishing much of the traditional novelist's social territory (pace Richardson and Emily Brontë), and to expand the material at such length is therefore to take risks, especially as the lack of plot movement has to be compensated for by depth. Considering the scale of the book, there is insufficient depth, partly because the fairly conservative techniques Hanley uses do not permit him to unveil his characters all that thoroughly. It may seem inappropriate to invoke the yardstick of James, Joyce and Lawrence here, but it is a tribute to Hanley's seriousness as a novelist that he merits such comparison, even though he comes off badly by it. Ironically, if Hanley had expanded the book even more by building up the past through more flashbacks than he does, A Kingdom might have been considerably more distinguished than it is or than it would have been if compressed to novella length. It would have been a less tidy, formally pure work of art, but a humanly richer and more vital one. (pp. 50-2)
Desmond Graham, in Stand (copyright © by Stand), Vol. 20, No. 1 (1978–79).
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