The long road [in The Long Road to Paradise] is Corporal Johnny Church's path to execution at Burford in 1649, for refusing service in Ireland and trying to hold Cromwell to his promises. As an individual's the story is hardly an interesting one; we are told its conclusion right at the start, and the narrative style—continuous first-person recapitulation—has a quality more slow than dreamy. But Miss Settle is more concerned with historical perspectives that the fates of men.

Apart from the odd Ranter and a sprinkling of Bible texts, there is no marked sense of the religious dimension in the [British] Civil War, and while some play is made with the changed meanings of democratic, anarchical, liberal, and radical, it is hard to believe in a seventeenth-century regimental agitator who says things like "either/or".

Still, Miss Settle has chosen an interesting period and has picked out...