SOURCE: "A Long and Wretched Vigil," in The New York Times Book Review, December 1, 1985, pp. 11-12.

In the following review, Robinson argues that Blackwood ignores such larger political issues as Britain's military commitments and instead focuses on the violence and sexuality associated with the women protestors.

Caroline Blackwood's On the Perimeter, though it is perfectly dreadful considered as prose and as journalism, merits attention all the same for the strange emotional charge it carries. The surreal warping of syntax, the dotty preoccupation with mud and sex and rude odors, are the testament to an anxiety so intense as to have lost a clear sense of its occasion.

Miss Blackwood's subject is a long and famous vigil by a band of women at Greenham Common, an American military base near Newbury, England, at which cruise missiles are deployed. Four years ago, in protest against their coming, a group of...