William Mayne has never made any concessions to the lazy or inattentive reader: he has never written the fully-automated book. In any case, we cannot all like the same things, and even among books of comparable merit there must always be some that strike a more popular note than others. Nevertheless, the impression of Mayne as a writer of somewhat rarefied excellence—one who operates at a high literary altitude where the air is thin—still persists, and may have some justification. Re-reading many of his novels in a short time—after having previously read and admired them individually at the time of publication—I am inclined to feel that Mayne as a writer has a characteristic which deprives his work of a substantial and vital element.
This, I think, is a tendency to shy away from the passions. Children feel strong emotion and can be deeply conscious of strong emotion in others, even when it is not understood. Life without it is less than the whole of life. Mayne is aware of the passions, most notably so in Ravensgill, but even there he appears to define deep feeling by drawing round its edges rather than plunging in. One senses in Ravensgill that the air is full of old guilt and fear, grievance and feud and loss; but one is never there in the middle, experiencing these things. Pity and terror are rare in Mayne's books; the expression of love, in any of its many forms, is to the best of my recollection absent. To say this is not to make an adverse criticism of any book. Ravensgill seems to me exceptionally fine, and I do not suggest that the author could or should have written it differently. But there is a limitation here. I suspect that it is a lack of robustness and of red corpuscle in Mayne's work which often causes it to make a less satisfying impact than that of writers who are more crude in their perceptions and far less gifted artistically. (p. 131)
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