This section contains 284 words (approx. 1 page at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: "Ogres," in New Statesman, Vol. 106, No. 2739, September 16, 1983, p. 23.
In the excerpt below, Ingoldby describes the characters from Good Night Sweet Ladies as well-developed and the story as funny, but suggests that Blackwood does not develop conflict within the stories sufficiently.
Caroline Blackwood's characters are a neatly observed group of humans, vain, selfish and self-deluding, who peep at the truth about themselves and then quietly, quickly, close the door. They are great betrayers of themselves, their animals and each other, and stylish inventors of strategies which just enable them to circumnavigate the truth. Taft, the social worker, protects himself from intimacy ('as a lover he merely obliged') by the invention of the tragic loss of his wife, which always gets him out of a hole; Mrs Burton can persuade herself that a dinner appointment is more important than a dying dog. Such strategies invite prodigious guilt which in...
This section contains 284 words (approx. 1 page at 300 words per page) |