[The] world into which Miss Renault guides us [in "The Charioteer"] is as alien and as insular as any evocation of ancient or archaic Greece.

It is the shadowy world of the homosexual, at once familiar and strange, like a hall of mirrors in which the reflections are subtly distorted. Beyond the flashlight of Miss Renault's attention we are aware of much unseen, much unspoken. It is a world of heightened sensibility and rare delicacy, so much so that heterosexual intrusions invariably strike a vulgar note, like an American entering a Japanese garden….

Tribute must be paid Miss Renault for remarkable literary talents. Her prose, at its best, is dazzling, her perceptions sharp and original, her dialogue natural to the ear. But she has succeeded better than she knows, or perhaps differently from what she intended. She has peopled her world with the hypersensitive, the bloodless, and the self-obsessed. Her characters are vivid, but they are exotics. Their untiring delicacy becomes, like a steady diet of English lady writers, tiresome—and the intrusion of some good old-fashioned heterosexual vulgarity welcome.

Miss Renault asks more of us than we can give. As well as sympathy she demands identification. But Odell's world is so alien that its conflicts are internecine; we watch bemused, like anthropologists at a native fertility rite that seems to bear some faint connection to our culture. Miss Renault makes it very clear that the homosexuality of her characters is not simply a matter of unorthodox sexual impulses but the woof and warp of their being. They are spiritually effeminate; they bathe in sentimentality…. And Miss Renault's lush prose, too often equatorial rather than temperate, drips a heavily metered accompaniment.