John Mitchinson

in that they have a precision and understatement are the things that they excel at.

And yet they're very different writers from one another.

I've got a review here from Country Life of Human Voices.

But it's by Marganita Lasky.

Oh, okay.

I apologise.

Who had a gig reviewing for Country Life.

Who knew, right?

This is how she starts this, and this is a joint review of Rites of Passage by William Golding and Human Voices.

Of these two well-titled novels, William Golding's Rites of Passage is serio-tragic and Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices is serio-comic.

Golding won this year's Booker Prize, Fitzgerald last year's.

Both novels are of rare quality.

If pressed to say which is the better, I can only answer that different criteria must apply.

If the reader wants a book that makes him think and go on thinking, then Golding is his man.

If he wants a book that makes him think and laugh, Fitzgerald is his woman.

The only qualitative comparison I will venture is that Fitzgerald makes us laugh more than Golding makes us think.

She has the lead character in the bookshop, Muse, to herself, which she clearly, you know, also was an opinion she shared with her character.

There's a bit where she says human beings are divided into the class of either exterminators or exterminatees.

And I think this book, in a sense, like all her books, she's really interested in power.

in how people position themselves in relation to one another, not the exercise of power, that's not what I mean, but how in the section in Human Voices, again, a recurring theme, the idea of falling in love with someone and being in love with someone, and that's the status quo now.