Early in 1960 Pamela Hansford Johnson … published a remarkably effective novel called "The Humbler Creation." It was written in the Victorian tradition of Trollope, and it read somewhat like an imaginative social worker's report on the joyless career of a London clergyman whose acceptance of his frustrations made him seem to symbolize a middle-class British preference for public duty over private fulfillment. Now, two and a half years later she has published ["An Error of Judgement"], a more ambitious but artistically less successful study of a London physician who behaves quite differently, kicks over the traces when he makes an unpleasant discovery about his wife, stops practising medicine and finally commits murder. Miss Johnson has turned away from sociology to metaphysics; she is now examining evil.

In doing so she has put aside her talents of empathy, style and structure. It is difficult to identify oneself with Dr. Setter...