[Out] of the tension between a disruptive reality seemingly antagonistic to art and a scrupulous devotion to the craft of fiction [P. H. Newby] creates his characteristic work. Willing on the one hand to agree with V. S. Pritchett that "the real subject of the best writing now being done is that impersonal shadow, 'the contemporary situation,'" he is confident that fidelity to the contemporary situation need not mean a dreary succession of "political" novels…...

For Newby's artistic development the placing of the trilogy [consisting of The Picnic at Sakkara (1955), Revolution and Roses (1957), and A Guest and His Going (1959)] is important. It follows immediately his attempt to come to terms with his memories of World War II in A Step to Silence (1952) and The Retreat (1953), novels in which the imagination becomes circumscribed, myth fragments, connections falter, and sanctuary is reached (if at all) only after violence, death, and mental peril. The comic t...

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 ...

Mr Newby writes with an ease which conceals the utmost care and economy. He is wonderfully and intelligently inventive, and organises his material so well that this complex story [A Guest and His Going], with its many layers of interest, never strains the reader. He manages continually to surprise, though on examination it is seen that he has left clues everywhere so quiet is his manner. Occasionally, however, a development seems imposed from without; and perhaps the element of fantasy is a little too stron...