Roy Fuller, poet as well as novelist, has in a sense pooled his resources in [The Carnal Island] in order to probe the range of questions thrown up by an encounter between an old poet and a young one, and the result is a very perceptive, often amusing, and at times sad and touching, novel. The narrative framework is deliberately slight. The young poet, James, has an assignment to persuade the 80-year-old poet, Daniel House, to compile an anthology for a publisher, and visits him in his house overlooking an estuary. He meets the old man's wife, his illegitimate daughter and her illegitimate daughter, his local friends, his 15-year-old dog. Almost the only 'action' is a swim in the sea and a fatal ferry-crossing. But the light chain of events, all ordinary except for the climactic ferry, is carefully forged to set memory and speculation free, to allow the relationship between the two writers to develop quickly and naturally from curiosity to respect and love, and also to reinforce the point the book seems to want to make, that art's job is mainly, through feeling, to transform the commonplace. This point is emphasised in James's conviction that Daniel's poetry was released not through his socialist belief that the world must be changed but through his private flashpoints of love and involvement.

Yet the necessary mundaneness, symbolised on one page by a cheap glass dish of crisps brought in with beer on a tray, cannot be separated from myth and mystery when strong human feelings, or the even stronger urges towards art, begin to emerge. The title of the novel is also the title of a sequence of erotic poems published by Daniel in the Twenties, and the 'island' is in fact the land across the estuary, where his daughter still lives. The dead mother, the reality behind the passionate affair celebrated in the poems, had ridden a horse along the beach on a misty day and been drowned, but was it suicide, or an assignation with Daniel, or an assignation with another lover as the poetry suggested? The 'sea-nymph' theme returns when the granddaughter and her girlfriend go swimming with James, and again at the end when the foundered boat is called Sea Nymph and the aged poet is delivered to the dangerous element he loved. In a book which for its length may seem a shade over-baggaged with quotations, Mr Fuller forbears to quote the end of Eliot's 'Prufrock', but one feels that those sea-girls, and the human voices that 'wake us and we drown', must have been very much in the author's mind.

Charlie the ferryman reminds the narrator of Charon, the estuary becomes the Styx, Daniel's dog becomes Cerberus, and Daniel himself an Orpheus who bursts into poetic recital on board. All this is done fairly lightly, but it jars, even on the level of dramatic irony. On the other hand, there are some beautifully managed moments where restraint says everything.