James Hanley has been discovered and rediscovered for almost half a century. When his last book came out in 1973, Time magazine, calling him "one of the most consistently praised and least-known novelists in the English-speaking world," echoed its judgment of 20 years before: "If critics' raves paid their way in royalties … Hanley might well be one of the richest authors alive."… His earlier novels—more than 20—have been accorded a respectful ne...

[James Hanley] is an example of a novelist who has often aimed at a poetic type of fiction, restricting the social range of his work in his quest for intensity and significant form. He has undoubtedly pursued his art with dedication and integrity, and although he has elicited few displays of enthusiastic acclaim he has rightly won a great deal of respect for his artistic purity. Of his two books recently published, the reissued The Welsh Sonata (1954) is much more conspicuously poetic than the less ambitiou...

[The] idea of traveling—in the mind, over the mountains, or back in time—is central to ["The Welsh Sonata" and "A Kingdom"]. A day has its own elasticity—a morning "is beginning to stretch itself," and elsewhere, "to grow." The past of a man is never lost, but accumulates in the common memory: "Yesterday a man, today a tale."… The writing in both books is sometimes laconic, sometimes poetic, sometimes graphical...

The Welsh Sonata is a romantic, lyrical tale about a missing man, whose inexplicable departure from a tiny, locked-in village haunts the conscience of many and draws out the bardic talents of a few. The real subject of the book is a living and omnipresent network of private fantasies hoarded against the deprivations of a wilderness. Hanley conjures drama out of the seemingly endless inflections of a spare assortment of phrases and images that bring home "how far a word will go, how deep, or how high ...

'The worst thing is when nothing, absolutely nothing happens to a person in a whole lifetime. Just think of that.' Enduring, or escaping from such a nothing is what James Hanley's beautifully controlled, exquisitely written novel [A Kingdom] is all about. On the face of it, nothing much does happen…. Death gives birth to links and significances previously slipped into the mind's back pockets, and this novel is not just about paternal dominance and filial acceptance …...