Death of the Fox is splendid, a magnificent book, and very probably one of the dozen best novels to have been written in my lifetime. Indeed, it is so extraordinary a work that it raises certain questions about the history and the future of the novel itself, about the relation of the novelist to his public, and about the ultimate mysteries of Fame and Fortune which lie not only at the heart of this novel but at the heart of the experience of all of us. (p. 277)

The technical excellence of both [The Finished Man and Which Ones Are The Enemy?], the wit, the appeal were as irrelevant as the eloquent need of some poor sucker who buys his lottery ticket and sits back to wait for the big money. Each of them was a good book in its way. The Finished Man was a more than usually ingratiating first novel about Florida politics and—perhaps—Garrett's father. Which Ones Are The Enemy? was a novel about army life in Trieste—where Garrett served—and was more polished, more authoritative in its tone, surer in its technical aspects, richer…. Really, a damned good book. In each case, however, the bright pebble of experience that Garrett was weaving into his nest of ironies and clarities was important to him; the craft with which he managed the novels was of interest to a few hundred enthusiasts of the novel. (p. 280)

Death of the Fox is a huge book, but its devices are minute and precise…. The fictional constraint is very nearly as oppressive as Ralegh's own, in that the possibilities of action are severely limited. There is thought, of course—recollection, analysis, regret, celebration. But thought is a frustrating business unless there is some medium for its expression, some translation into speech and gesture, some resulting action. The great motion of the book, then, is the building of concentration and frustration, and then moments of release as, by the smallest but most satisfactory exercises of choice, Ralegh performs.

These performances, moreover, are frequently the historically reported ones, small pieces of bright fact that have survived in histories and biographies. This is what any historical novelist would try to do, working in as many of these little nuggets as possible. But for Garrett, the strategy is more ambitious. His scheme, so far as I can tell, is to make these little pieces of business the flowering of the garden he has been so carefully tending for hundreds of pages, the embodiment of attitudes, the natural result and necessary crown of all the internal business of intellection and recollection. (pp. 287-88)

Even the most cursory investigation into the details of Ralegh's life and into the history of the period will show how precise Garrett has been in maintaining that balance between imagination and factual correctness, and between Ralegh's limited area of freedom and the web of necessity in which he hung. (p. 290)

[Instead] of cribbing from Garrett and history, I shall cite the concluding sentences of the book: "The ax is bright in the dwindling sunlight. Flashes high before it falls. Higher by far a lone gull banks and circles on the darkening air. Then flies away to vanish over the Thames."

The key words, I think, are "by far" for they are the connecting words. Obviously a gull can fly higher than an ax. The connection establishes, merely by syntax, a point of view below in the crowd, a pair of eyes that looks up to the flash of the ax, and then, at the last moment, deciding not to look at its fall, averts to a gull higher by far, and by so doing admits to Ralegh the dignity he has earned, indicts the blunder of King James, and, most important, makes those historical judgments in immediate, sensuous terms.

So long as that kind of thing can be managed, there is a place for historical fiction, a very high place, and one that has only rarely been attempted. It is especially in the light of that rarity and the difficulty of which it is symptomatic, that I delight in and admire Death of the Fox. (pp. 293-94)