THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Miss Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers ends, it is true, with a victory, but a victory in a war which, the reader is aware throughout the story, is inevitably lost. For this is a story of the decline of Roman Britain. Miss Sutcliff has written most sensitively in two previous books about other aspects of this theme. In each the ultimate disaster has lain like a shadow across the action. In the Place of Life, deep in the mists of Caledonia, Marcus the Centurion had felt it (in The Eagle of the Ninth), and his descendant Flavius...
Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism, ©1983 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
(The entire page is 482 words.)
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