The themes which preoccupy Roy Fuller in his poetry are nakedly, indeed oppressively, active in [The Carnal Island]. Most of Fuller's verse has, in one way or another, been about the role of the poet in a society that is hostile or indifferent to him; how absurd and tragic the discrepancy between the poet's art-life and his real life, between his grand therapeutic dreams and his actual social and political impotence. Can Freud and Marx be married? That classic worry of the 1930s has continued to provide Fuller with his basic subject matter, preventing him from either retreating into the personal or from striding out into the public. If the persona of his most recent poems has been one of disappointment and exhaustion, it has also seemed rather heroic; he is, after all, the only one of those many bright young men of theory who has not either stopped writing altogether or lapsed into godliness or borrowed rusticism.

The central figure in The Carnal Island can offer similar credentials. A famous poet, now in his eighties, Daniel House is a veteran of the trenches as well as of the Spanish Civil War, but he is very much a 1930s figure….

The Carnal Island is narrated by a young poet/publisher, an admirer of House (one who "knows" him through his work). Visiting the old poet for a weekend in order to persuade him to edit an anthology, James Ross finds himself drawn into a study of the real-life background to the art-life of the poems. The connexions and the contradictions, the facts transmuted and suppressed, evaded and enhanced—contemplating these is to contemplate the mechanics of poetic truth. Knowing the man and knowing the man's work; in one sense, they are the same thing and in another they are utterly distinct.

It is a knotty and absorbing topic and Fuller does not duck any of its intellectual demands. Unfortunately the fictional embodiment is a good deal more knotty than absorbing. The characterization is thinly utilitarian, the dramas unsurprising and a good third of the book is devoted to bald literary theorizing—cast unconvincingly as conversation. And the narrator is afflicted with a style of such excruciating pomposity that everything he touches gets bogged down in verbiage…. It is suggested here and there throughout the novel that this style is "Housian", and that the narrator employs it in admiring imitation of the master. There are also hints that we are supposed to find it repellently mannered and pedantic (another measure of the distance between art and life). But we cannot help noting that it is a style which has much in common with Roy Fuller's own style when writing in his own persona; we therefore have to wonder just how repellent we are meant to find it.