also contains Prof. Stewart the Oxford scholar and Michael Innes the writer of detective novels. The detective novels are written in the garden in North Oxford, the scholarly books are written in Christ Church under an enormous photograph of the South Pole (one has to ask what such an expanse of framed whiteness might represent). I don’t know where the novels are written—they were added after the time, years ago, when I used to go on Saturdays to Prof. Stewart’s rooms (across the hall from where Alice in Wonderland was written), sit under the South Pole, and exchange lore about my remote country (“Just what, Mr. Davenport, is an Esso station?”) for instruction in English literature.
Mr. Stewart’s novels are careful and restrained, as if the subject ought not to be gone into either too thoroughly or in unseemly haste. Suggest, suggest. There is, however, such a thing as under suggesting, or suggesting with a darkness one did not intend. The effect of such careful treading on Mr. Stewart’s part is a nagging suspicion that the author is making his story out of whole cloth, with a hint here and there from other novelists. In Vanderlyn’s Kingdom, for instance, the setting and several heaping handfuls of plot are taken from John Fowles’ The Magus. To cover up for this, there are obvious borrowings from Thomas Hardy (in the modern manner, for the sake of irony).
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