[In The Ruined Boys, published in the United States as That Distant Afternoon,] Mr. Roy Fuller has written a series of quiet vignettes of school life. We are subjected to no gradual gathering of momentum, to no resounding climax. The boy Bracher is taken through three terms of his life in a second-rate English boarding school, makes friends and enemies, rumbles the headmaster, and at the end learns that Mr. Percy, the master who has exercised most influence over him, will not be returning after the holidays. That is all. It does not seem much, perhaps, set against the bloodbaths and the perversions one so increasingly reads about. And yet the book, quietly ironic, unobtrusively accomplished, fully succeeds in what it purposes to do. The trickle of small incidents, each one scrupulously observed from the point of view of the boy, saps busily away at Bracher's unfledged confidence in, and respect for, an immutable ordered world. The absolute monarchy of the headmaster in the English public school system has rarely been sniped at with more murderous accuracy….

Mr. Fuller's writing is admirably lucid and controlled. His Virgilian fondness for extended simile gives an illuminating stateliness to his prose.