[In the following review, Robinson argues that Blackwood ignores such larger political issues as Britain's military commitments and instead focuses on the violence and sexuality associated with the women protestors.]

Caroline Blackwood's On the Perimeter, though it is perfectly dreadful considered as prose and as journalism, merits attention all the same for the strange emotional charge it carries. The surreal warping of syntax, the dotty preoccupation with mud and sex and rude odors, are the testament to an anxiety so intense as to have lost a clear sense of its occasion.

Miss Blackwood's subject is a long and famous vigil by a band of women at Greenham Common, an American military base near Newbury, England, at which cruise missiles are deployed. Four years ago, in protest against their coming, a group of women and children walked 400 miles, from Wales, to establish a camp outside the base. Women are camped there still, maintaining a vigil notable for the extreme wretchedness of the conditions in which they live. Local authorities try to drive them away with bulldozers, midnight raids and confiscations. Local thugs set the surrounding bushes on fire. Still, women continue to live outside the gates of the base, in "benders," tiny shelters made of branches and plastic, in defiance of hostility, tedium, cold and mud, sustained by the gifts of well-wishers—of whom there are a great many—and by the fact that their protest has become a sort of pilgrimage site for like-minded people from the ends of the earth.

You would never know, reading this little book, how the world order creaked with stress as cruise missiles were planted through the west of Europe. You will not learn here that these protesters had hoped to prevent the nuclear missiles from arriving at all and that the machinations of the British Government in deploying them caused a notable uproar and ended in the trial and imprisonment of a young female bureaucrat who slipped information about the missiles to the press. You would never learn that there is an outside world at all, did its emissaries not arrive at Greenham Common with dogs and truncheons, or with brown bread and soup and £10 notes.

Nor does Miss Blackwood, who is a novelist and the widow of Robert Lowell, tell us much about Greenham Common itself. Who are these women? "Women often hardly knew each other's names on the camps…. They were just 'women' and they shared a terror of 'nukes' and that was all they had to unify them." Miss Blackwood makes the acquaintance of a nurse named Pat. When, later, she inquires after her, someone asks, "Do you mean older Pat?" She muses, "I imagined that I did, but they probably had many Pats on the base." There were as well a "mongol" (a person with Down's syndrome) and a girl who seemed mentally ill, punks with shaved heads and lesbians who, in Miss Blackwood's happy phrase, "seemed determined to overegg the sexual pudding." They kissed in public.

Never seeming to know it, Miss Blackwood describes a world in which things have fallen into rather lurid decay. Here is how she begins: "I was very curious to meet the Greenham women, for the press had decorated them with such loathsome and frightening adjectives, they had been made to sound almost mythical in their horror. They'd been described as 'belligerent harpies,' 'a bunch of smelly lesbians,' as 'ragtag and bobtall,' and 'the screaming destructive witches of Greenham.'… They were also described as being in the pay of the Soviet Union…. I found the charge that the Greenham women lived like dogs and that they were smearing Newbury with their excrement almost the most chilling one, although it had less grave political connotations."

Can this be true? Can the press really have charged the Greenham women with "smearing Newbury with their excrement"? Miss Blackwood is not very clear about the sources of these charges. For example, although the phrase "a bunch of smelly lesbians" appears to be quoted from somewhere, no newspaper is named. So perhaps she is merely creating phantom adversaries to add drama to her tale—reprehensible as technique, but not in itself alarming.

Then at the top of the next page, we find the English writer Auberon Waugh credited with the claim that "the Greenham women smelt of 'fish paste and bad oysters,'" which remark, Miss Blackwood says, "also haunted me for it had such distressing sexual associations." I must take her word for that. As to the health of political dialogue in which it is considered telling and appropriate to speak of one's adversaries in such terms, I have my own views. Miss Blackwood takes the stance of one entirely prepared to believe these reports. On approaching a gray-haired woman, she says: "If she was a Greenham witch, I hated the idea that she might get up and scream at me. If she was as destructive as I'd been told, she might give me a vicious stab with her knitting needles. But above all, I dreaded that she might suddenly behave like a dog and defecate."

Miss Blackwood spends vastly more time on the issue of whether or not the Greenham women truly do have an evil smell than she does on issues of seemingly greater moment. She pauses later in the book to ascribe the war fears of the women to a statement by Nikita Khrushchev disavowing overkill ("Once is quite enough. What good does it do to annihilate a country twice?"); and remarks by the Rev. Jerry Falwell to the effect that born-again Christians need not fear nuclear war or Armageddon. Of the citizens of Newbury, she says: "No one ever said that they found it frightening that Jerry Falwell claimed Ronald Reagan was a 'Born Again Christian.' They expressed no anxiety that an American president who felt he was going to be automatically 'raptured' might view nuclear war with a certain nonchalance." It is much, in our uncertain world, to ask anyone to share anxieties as attenuated as these are. After all, Khrushchev is long gone. And if President Reagan views death with nonchalance, he is still as willing as anyone else to take a rain check. I find little evidence that Miss Blackwood has inquired deeply into the concerns of politically minded people.

The real preoccupations of On the Perimeter are violence, sexuality and filth in various forms. In telling the story of "peace women" camped near a country town, Miss Blackwood has continual recourse to words like "loathing," "hatred," "terror," "repulsion." The two British paratroopers who watch her arrive are "like ferocious animals as they glared at the benders with an expression of venomous hatred." Their "nasty yellow-eyed expression" makes her speculate that "they saw the peace campers as leprous and felt that anyone who had any contact with them might spread the contagion throughout the community, and for this reason would be better exterminated." Nor are these yellow-eyed soldiers the worst of their troubles. "The hooligan youths from Newbury came down in the night and poured pigs' blood and maggots and excrement all over them"—enough, surely, to dispel the odor of sanctity. Of the soldiers' "bellowing their horrible obscenities," she says, "They seemed besplattered with their own oaths and soiled by their own sordid fantasies." She reports that "the brutal youths from Newbury … drove past the camps screaming maniacal abuse at the women," who, for their part, "loathed and feared" weapons and force as "manifestations of masculinity."

Take the book simply as artifact. Does it attempt to give a true image of reality? Are we really to believe that soldiers stand around with their faces twisted in hatred, day after day? Miss Blackwood describes them elsewhere as grumbling to the women about food on the base, even bringing them tea. We are told that the bailiffs who wreck the benders during working hours help to rebuild them on their own time. Details like these square better with ordinary life than do the Expressionist images of rage and hatred by which the book is dominated. Why do these palliative gestures not soften the anger with which these people are regarded? There is a cruelty in Miss Blackwood's own vision that she projects effortlessly onto others, as when she says, "On one of the camps I'd seen a mongol girl and I couldn't imagine what she was doing there. I wondered if she'd soon be spotted by a hostile photographer and presented as a typical Greenham woman." Yet the book was well received in Britain, so it must not seem grossly out of line to those in a better position to judge.

To understand the anxiety with which this book is so strongly charged, it is probably useful to consider what it does not acknowledge. For example, the idea that Britain is a potential target of Soviet missiles because American missiles are stationed there ignores the fact that Britain maintains nuclear missiles of its own, which it will not make subject to any arms control negotiation—to the Soviet Union's dismay, since they must be assumed to be intended for use against Russia in the worst case. Britain is therefore a target in its own right, and of its own choice.

Worse, Britain is a major producer of bomb-grade plutonium. During the period described in this book, the press was full of the news that the west coast of Britain had been, over 35 years, extensively contaminated with wastes from Sellafield, a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. Miss Blackwood's references to plutonium and leukemia reflect, I suppose, the widely reported discovery that children in the villages near the reprocessing plant have one chance in 60 of developing leukemia by the age of 15. If the superpowers were to vanish tomorrow, Britain's troubles would still be very great. These women claim to look the harsh truth full in the face, yet they deny by ignoring it the responsibility of their own Government—and, if Britain is a democracy, their responsibility too—for the continuing contamination of their coast, the sea and the Irish coast.

Miss Blackwood says the women "believed that by their presence on Greenham Common they were acting as symbolic candles that represented the conscience of humanity." Let me refine her simile. Greenham Common is a candlelight vigil kept in a burning house.