SOURCE: "From a View to a Death," in The Times Literary Supplement, January 11, 1980, pp. 27-8.

[In the following review, Lodge discusses The Executioner's Song.]

What the American short-story writer Leonard Michaels calls "the condemned prisoner story" (in a book, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, which contains and alludes to several examples of the genre) has exercised a powerful fascination over the modern literary imagination. This is not surprising. Capital punishment, and the ritual associated with it, dramatize the inevitability and finality of personal death with a stark intensity that no other action, not even terminal illness, can match. We all know that we must die, but most of the time we suppress the knowledge, or others suppress it for us; only the condemned prisoner must live with the certain knowledge of the exact day and hour at which he will pass from life to death...