Volume 37, Number 8 · May 17, 1990
The Real Thing
By John Bayley
The Book of Evidence
by John Banville
Scribner's, 220 pp., $17.95
In one of her Common Reader pieces Virginia Woolf makes a comparison between Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Scott, she says, writes badly; his language rarely rises above the commonplace; but as we read on the leisurely, even slovenly, manner disappears as a complete new world comes into being. Stevenson, on the other hand, writes like an angel; his style is as fresh as a daisy and his phrases never put a foot wrong. But even as we admire his 'dapper little adjectives' (Virginia Woolf's typically cruel description) we realize that the writing is everything: we are not stepping into what seems a new and spacious reality, independent of the words.
Review, 2525 words
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