P. H. Newby's [One of the Founders] embraces limitation a little too willingly. One of the Founders has his flair for topicality: here, the world of the Robbins report, the material being the founding of a new university in a provincial town…. Assorted scenes from provincial life are briskly exhibited, and the two physical climaxes of the book are an absurd sort of seduction and a bungled sword-fight, both amusingly grotesque in the way that Mr Newby has long since mastered. The first half of the novel in particular is often very funny and is well-observed—though well-heard would be a better description, since the dialogue tells without revealing…. This is the sort of novel of which it is said that it works on more than one level, the truth being that it is far from clear which floor one is meant to be on at a given time; mezzanine fiction, perhaps.
Part of the trouble (if trouble it is and not obtuseness on the reviewer's part) is that Hedges [the novel's protagonist] resembles too closely for the novel's later good the over familiar device of handicapping the hero…. Hedges' generally unillumined state about his own motivation, his feeling that the vital clue lies just out of sight, is a dangerous one for the novelist to play, and one is inclined to suspect Mr Newby of souping up the action in order to stop the book coming to rest in a vacuum. But even if the more serious aspects of the book ought either to have added up to something more, or have been deducted in the interests of clarity, there is an extremely adroit and practised hand behind the comedy, and the characterization, though external, has its individual manner…. The final qualification, however, remains: whether [Mr Newby] ought not, with such gifts, to try to do more. The whole property has the air of being insured for more than it's worth. (pp. 99-100)
Stephen Wall, in London Magazine (© London Magazine 1965), December, 1965.
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