[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…. [When] "events" are no longer separable from the starkly unpoetic reality of a world at war, the unsettling doubts surface. In what terms can the transforming and shaping powers of the imagination be brought to bear on such insanity without falsifying? (pp. 121-22)

[In A Step to Silence and The Retreat] Newby poses most insistently the question of the responsibility of the private witness for a world of violence.

That question, and...