A Sinking Island (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Hugh Kenner’s trilogy focuses on diverse responses to the groundbreaking achievements of modernism, as exemplified by the works of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. A SINKING ISLAND, however, is not a typical piece of academic literary criticism. Kenner’s scholarship is indeed superb, and here as elsewhere he excels at close reading, but he is a marvelous storyteller as well as a gifted critic.

As his title indicates, Kenner’s overview of the English literary scene is not favorable. He finds the English guilty of willful provincialism and aggressive middle-brow resistance to artistic innovation. While that perspective shapes Kenner’s account, A SINKING ISLAND is far from being an unrelenting chronicle of failure. With uncanny authority, Kenner shows how writers find and make use of what they need in the works of their predecessors an contemporaries: Eliot drawing on the urbane idiom of John Dryden; William Butler Yeats discovering the crisp lyrics of Ben Jonson; Joseph Conrad, surprisingly, learning narrative tricks from H.G. Wells. There is also a wealth of fact and anecdote concerning publishers, readers, and the popular press in England from the 1890’s to the 1980’s.

Kenner’s book is provocative by design, and few readers will finish it without having been infuriated by some of his judgments. In his introduction, which reviews the scheme of the trilogy, literature in English is divided among Ireland, America, and England--a division that fails to account for English-language writers in Australia, Canada, India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Kenner cannot be faulted for limiting his topic, but by omitting all mention of these writers he implies, intentionally or not, that they are unworthy of notice. There is much else to argue with in A SINKING ISLAND, but there is even more to celebrate. It is a book without a boring page.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIV, December 15, 1987, p. 671.

Chicago Tribune. January 29, 1988, V, p. 3.

Choice. XXV, July, 1988, p. 1694.

Kirkus Reviews. LV, December 1, 1987, p. 1661.

Library Journal. CXIII, January, 1988, p. 87.

London Review of Books. X, November 10, 1988, p. 8.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 31, 1988, p. 1.

The New Criterion. VI, February, 1988, p. 63.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, February 21, 1988, p. 28.

The Times Literary Supplement. September 9, 1988, p. 981.

The Wall Street Journal. April 6, 1988, p. 22.

The Washington Post Book World. XVIII, April 3, 1988, p. 9.