SOURCE: Banville, John. “Big News from Small Worlds.” New York Review of Books 40, no. 7 (8 April 1993): 22-4.

In the following excerpt, Banville compliments Thorpe's writing in Ulverton as “rich, tough, [and inventive,” though notes that the novel's final section is considerably weaker than the rest of the work.]

Adam Thorpe too stays close to a small place, in his case Ulverton, a fictional village on the Wessex Downs of England. Thorpe, who was born in 1956, was already known as a poet before he published [Ulverton], his first novel, which was highly praised when it appeared in Britain last year. It is a big, dense work which moves from 1650 to 1988 in twelve sections varying greatly in style and content. The first episode tells of the return to Ulverton of one of Cromwell's soldiers back from the Irish campaign. The narrator is a shepherd who first spies the ragged trooper in...