[What William Mayne's] writing has shown is that stories for children need not drive straight from opening to end; they can shape themselves by a sort of sly oblique process, emerge sideways and even backwards out of dialogue and hints. In fact, all his stories have strong narrative spines; but they are not rigid ones. He has also come so close to the true nature of children's talk and to the way they feel and think that it must be more difficult than it was for a writer of any sensitiveness to reproduce that blunt form of dialogue, always obviously to the purpose, and that falsely consequent rendering of patterns of young thought and feeling, that are conventions of writing for children. In a sense, Mr Mayne has reminded us of the precise nature of children. (p. 79)

William Mayne's stories are full of … pure true comedy of talk among children, of talk between children and adults (the adults sometimes exasperated or bemused by it, or without the leisure that enables the child to give it full attention; though the old, as they are often portrayed in William Mayne's stories, are seen to have re-acquired their sense of the intricate meanings of language). And, apart from his purely comic concern with words, William Mayne understands beautifully that language is itself part of the adventure of being alive and that, by misleading or puzzling or illuminating, it can inspire or direct events.

It is perhaps this feeling he has for the role played in life by language—especially in the lives of children, able to be so attentive—that more than anything makes Mayne a highly original and rare children's writer. He can be arch, and over-playful, and is capable of, as it were, doodling in the style of William Mayne; at times (I detected this especially in a recent story, The Battlefield) his children and the way they talk reflect the writer's agility with words, his inability to leave them alone, rather than their credible selves. He is an extraordinarily prolific writer…. [Certainly] this large output is responsible for the passages of doodling and of near-self-parody. It is also to be seen as a kind of generosity: he has spread his attention over many audiences, from the youngest to the most sophisticated. And because to each of those audiences, in each of the varied settings of his stories, he addresses himself in the same manner, in the tone of this dancing and devious concern with language (as well as because the structure of his writing is never difficult, and he is indeed a master of the short sentence), I cannot believe that those who say he is writing over the heads of children, or only for those with a special taste for words, are analysing the situation correctly. (p. 80)

From the moment you enter one of his stories, all your senses are deeply and very precisely involved…. [The] beauty of William Mayne's style is that it is never purple—there is rather [a] constant deft attentiveness to the sensations of being alive, usually expressed with a wholly unstrained wit. (p. 81)

But what is most important is that all this texture, to which I have found it necessary to pay attention before looking at anything else—this perpetual lively alertness to language and to sensations—is wholly at the service of Mr Mayne's stories. It can be enjoyed for its own sake, but it does not exist for its own sake. The little group of books he wrote about life in a choir school—beginning with A Swarm in May—stand slightly aside from the rest. They form a loving tribute to a special way of young life. The stories embody characteristic themes—the impact on the present of complex mysteries with their roots in the past, the conflict of attitudes to tradition, the relationships of the young and their elders—but, to my mind, exist as an achievement separate from the rest. They include some of William Mayne's best inventions: for example, the family of Pargales, who have tended the fabric of the cathedral for centuries, and whose notion of time, as of the relation of the generations among themselves, has become tied to the enormously leisurely pace at which stone crumbles, gargoyles weather and fall and must be replaced. In the other stories, two major preoccupations emerge. One is that of the treasure hunt, of the search for clues to some mystery that carries the characters back into the past. This is a common theme in writing for children, but William Mayne handles it in a most uncommon manner. Not only is there his usual teasing obliqueness of narration, at once crystal-clear and devious; but there is also a constant ambiguity that enables a story to be interpreted in the light both of the most sober common sense and of the most extravagant imagination. Fantasy and realism are beautifully enmeshed. This is the manner of stories such as The Thumbstick, The Rolling Season, The Battlefield: and is at its best, in my opinion, in A Grass Rope,… in which the various possible interpretations of the near-magical events have their convincing advocate among the characters: a child who believes in magic, a clever boy who brings scientific reasoning to the quest, the children's parents who are simply sensible about it all. The conclusion is perfectly poised: the reader may believe any of the explanations, and perhaps that reader is most worthy of the author who manages to believe all of them. This is a very serious achievement of William Mayne's, I think: to preserve such an active and enchanting neutrality as between all the levels of our experience. Beside this achievement, much writing for children—wholly embracing fantasy or opting for thorough realism—falls awfully short. (pp. 81-2)

The second large theme often, but not always, stems from this first one. It is the theme of enormous makings and destructions. The boys in Sand find what appear to be the remains of a prehistoric creature under the sand; they set out on an elaborate task of secret rescue, trying to retrieve these mysterious bones. The complications of their labour are vast; and so, too, are its consequences. In Pig in the Middle, a group of boys set out to transform an old barge into a seagoing vessel; as in Sand, they become intricately involved in the task. One of them, when they have achieved part of it, 'suddenly understood the beginnings of the Bible'. It is this business of making things—of planning for a construction, or of actually constructing—that again and again William Mayne celebrates; and again, of course, there could be few things closer to a child's heart. But so often in these stories the making leads to a vast unmaking, a catastrophe. In The Battlefield, the children's interest in the old tower in the marshes, the step they take to investigate and make use of it, lead to near-fatal consequences, a huge scene of flood and displacement. The children are in fact warned by an old shepherd that, with so many forces at work—those of nature and of history, for example—those exerted by inquiring man may be too much. The attempt to transform the old barge in Pig in the Middle leads to immense disaster again—or at any rate is closely associated with it: the complete collapse of the mill buildings in which the barge is housed. It seems to me that this theme of making and breaking, sometimes separate from the magical theme, sometimes part of it, is again a concern that takes William Mayne close to the young reader, much of whose own life is devoted to bold constructions and to curiosity about the consequences of interfering with nature.

It is easy to say that William Mayne is an uneven writer. That must be true of anyone who writes so much. The comment is sometimes made by critics who appear not to distinguish between the more ambitious stories and those that are less serious in intention. It is also easy, and I think quite wrong, to claim that he is a writer for a highly literate minority;… I believe this view is an invention of those who see only the freshness, subtlety and obliquity of the writing, and do not observe that it is always tied to stories of considerable narrative strength or that children everywhere have a delight in verbal ingenuity. These are, in fact, extremely sensible stories, and in my experience are recognised as such by a wide range of children. They are sensible because the heroes are never improbably heroic, and pure villains have no more place in the stories than they have in life itself. They are sensible also because Mr Mayne understands the fluctuating relationships of child with child, the tangle of emotional attitudes which is part of the reality of children's lives, and of which so many children's writers seem inadequately aware. One should add that William Mayne is a brilliant reporter on the nature of family life, on the role of mums and dads. Parents impose a framework, but that is not all that can be said about them; one of the best things about this writer's work is that he understands that, at intervals in their busy round, adults are likely to be as much influenced by their children as their children are by them. The children of the sixties are fortunate to possess a writer who can make such robust and copious literature out of a balance of so many gifts, all of them uncommon. (pp. 82-3)