The Modern British Novel

This dense volume will be a constant reference whenever I need coverage of the recent British novel. It is a long book, of long sentences in very long paragraphs. It's rather baggy prose is addicted to long lists of nouns, long strings of adjectives and rather (careless?) repetition. Bradbury divides the period, perhaps a bit arbitrarily roughly into decades. Each decade starts with a helpful but verbose summary of the relevant historical and artistic facts followed by a consideration of novels written in the decade, with fairly extended surveys of major figures. As befits a reference work the critical judgments offered feel more the "accepted" view than Bradbury's personal observations. Novelists whose work extended over several show more decades re-appear in several chapters resulting in a great deal of repetition and making it hard to follow the sweep of individual careers. As the book gets closer to the end of the period there are more and more books which are simply mentioned or summarized in a few words. All in all, a useful and informative book which could have been edited to 2/3 of its length. show less