SOURCE: "Wounded Children," in Listener, Vol. 105, No. 2707, February 26, 1981, p. 288.

Below, Kemp reviews The Fate of Mary Rose and discusses Blackwood's style of detached writing about very emotional subjects, particularly wounded children.

Wounds appall and fascinate Caroline Blackwood: her imagination can hardly tear itself away from them. Confronted with life's damage, she seems like the woman in one of her stories who—after a bungled operation—cannot close her eyes and is afraid to weep in case of dangerous inflammation. With unsparing lucidity, her books pore over maimings, physical and psychological. An early essay, 'Burns Unit', itemises hideous injuries—breasts like 'giant vermilion blisters', bodies 'the colour of blackened bacon'—then goes on to assess reactions to these horrors. The useless anguish of the patients' relatives is set against the emotionless efficiency of the medical staff. To the latter, precision is 'incomparably superior to compassion'; 'even the coldest and...