"The unmoonlit life is not worth living." So says Lucius Hutchfield, narrator of Pleasure-Dome, and that is perhaps as straightforward a thematic statement as can be gleaned from this odd, lyrical, quite wonderful novel. Unlike most contemporary fiction, it is neither urban in setting nor psychological in attack. It shares the first-person narrator of much recent work, but it does not share its almost obsessive concern with the narrator's inner life. Lucius' personal growth through his adventures is certainly noteworthy, but the tales are not just an excuse for his reactions to them. They are vigorous, full-blooded, and in need of no external "justification."…
The title is a metaphor for the world of story-telling into which Lucius invites many characters in the novel, and the reader as well. At first I thought the title was clumsy, and too "literary" for the matter of the book. Now it seems quite right. It is perhaps analogous to Sylvia Plath's "bell jar." Here the pleasure-dome produces similar distortions of fact, but the end result is some kind of better, more human truth. This is a very special experience.
Frank Kelly, "Fiction: 'Pleasure-Dome'," in Best Sellers (copyright © 1979 Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation), Vol. 39, No. 10, December, 1979, p. 323.
