Sutcliff, Rosemary 1920–: Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement

Miss Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers ends, it is true, with a victory, but a victory in a war which, the reader is aware throughout the story, is inevitably lost. For this is a story of the decline of Roman Britain. Miss Sutcliff has written most sensitively in two previous books about other aspects of this theme. In each the ultimate disaster has lain like a shadow across the action. In the Place of Life, deep in the mists of Caledonia, Marcus the Centurion had felt it (in The Eagle of the Ninth), and his descendant Flavius had read it in the flames of Calleva (in The Silver Branch). Now Aquila tastes the last bitterness of humiliation when he deserts the Eagles to stay in Britain when the last Legions pull out. The three novels belong together. Together they make perhaps the most interesting achievement of this remarkable writer.

It is well known that Miss Sutcliff owes her initial inspiration to [Rudyard] Kipling. There is much of Kipling in The Lantern Bearers, in the idea, in the sweep of the story, in—it must be confessed—certain stylistic mannerisms which from time to time stick out their uncomfortable spikes. Miss Sutcliff has so many talents and so much promise that one must wish that she would eschew Fine Writing. She handles her narrative with superb skill, particularly in scenes of violent action, but holds up the movement too often with passages of mannered prose. It is a hint of immaturity in a writer who has matured almost beyond recognition in the nine years since The Queen Elizabeth Story. There is increasing evidence in her recent books, and most of all in The Lantern Bearers, that she is ceasing to be a writer for children. The complex characters, the difficult motives, if not the toughness of the action, belong more obviously to writing for adults.

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