The Unspeakable Skipton represents a new and perhaps unexpected development in Pamela Hansford Johnson's talents. Together with The Last Resort, which appeared in 1956 and is surely one of the best novels of our time, it shows that there can no longer be excuse for failing to recognise that Miss Hansford Johnson is as good as any novelist writing in this country today. She began her career as a novelist when very young, and from the beginning she has been admirably professional; she has always known how to make the most use, in the most economical way, of her material. Short of the daemonic genius of an Emily Brontë, there is in the long run no substitute for professionalism. But it has its attendant dangers. It can degenerate into formula. The professional novelist's be-setting sin is always what Norman Douglas called 'the novelist's touch', the falsification of life through failure to realise the 'complexities of the ordinary human mind'. It is not a failure the novelists we read and re-read are guilty of; and one of the inspiriting qualities of The Last Resort was precisely Miss Hansford Johnson's skill in rendering the complexities, the contradictions, the discontinuities of behaviour, so that in the end the action she described could stand as a satisfying image of life itself, one rendered with a sad, lucid, honest acceptance that made it not silly to be reminded of George Eliot.
There was something else, too. It became slowly apparent that, very quietly, Miss Hansford Johnson was extending the territory of the novel. It was not that the types she was describing, or their milieu, were exactly new; but she had made them new: the retired, angry, self-absorbed doctor, his wife neurotically possessive of their daughter, the 'camp' architect, and the rest. She had seen all round them and caught them in a new light, in a new significance, so that in the end they were somehow bigger, richer as emblems of the human condition, than one might have expected them to be. 'The novelist's touch' was conspicuously absent from their delineation. So with The Unspeakable Skipton.
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