[There] have been few enough among us during the last couple of centuries who could … make a unity out of theme and structure, and give the reader a true sense of life being lived. But it does seem that the job is harder now, for the modern world, which is the modern novelist's world, is fragmented and fraught with absurdities, chary of hopes and vitiated with compromises as it has perhaps never been before. The trick, which not many writers accomplish, is to make the disruptions work toward a unity, to create an artistic wholeness by telling the truth about our civilization's shattered pieces. Eleanor Clark does this—or something very close to it—in Baldur's Gate….

One is tempted to say that the burden of this novel is the necessity for the present to redeem the past, for the living to expiate the dead, but this formulation would oversimplify. The now and the quick also stand in need of redemption.

The complexities of this long book are kept under control by Baldur's gate, which comes as close as any image could to encompassing all the public and private confrontations of the story. Baldur Blake enters the narrative drunk and departs it in the same state, his sculptures destroyed by unruly children, his offers of love rejected, his dream of creating housing projects of beauty confounded by the vagaries of high finance. In his sober interim, his gate, or at least his notion of one, has been an effort to answer our needs for identity and purpose and security…. Baldur's gate is meant to hang in the sky in symbolic defiance of the bomb and the comedy hour and the six o'clock news. (p. 635)

But more than this, the gate is indicative of modern man's nomadic existence; it is meant to be his comfort against the moves he must make from one part of the country to another, and the planned obsolescence of the houses he lives in and clothes that he wears. Or let me put it another way: the gate that once protected us from the barbarian without, must defend us now from an equally vicious but more subtle foe. Most of Miss Clark's characters have to make their accommodations with the past…. If I read the novel correctly, the point is that there is no way to avoid the responsibility of the past, nor to shirk the demands of the present. But there is a way out, and the way is love. (p. 636)

As readers of her other books know, Miss Clark writes with great skill. Here, she goes her own pace, maintaining absolute control over a mass of material, and she builds a complicated structure. But more important still is her gift for character and—if I may use this overworked word—her sensibility. She is able in a paragraph to bring a person alive and able through the length of her book to keep her main figures developing. This is the true fictional artistry. Through her perceptions into the ways of man, she shows us what it means to be human. (pp. 636-37)