Cold Snap is a well-peopled novel, all the minor characters fleshed out: Margaret, with whom Christine shares lodgings, the endlessly obliging and often irritating plain-girl best friend; Bill, cheerful, even genial, one-legged war veteran, unable to settle to university life; Christine’s demanding, but surprisingly sympathetic tutor; her difficult father and failing aunt; and the other German POWs. All are so thoroughly observed and imagined that they come to complex and convincing life.
Good novels are not merely lifelike — though making fiction lifelike is itself difficult enough; but they transform life, giving events and people a significance not always apparent in everyday existence. The art of fiction is selective. It does not, as Stevenson wrote, ‘compete with life’. Instead, ‘it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions … all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints in a good painting’.
Because a good novel does not compete with life, but extracts its material from life, it enables us to see more clearly and feel more deeply, and so to come to a truer appreciation of conduct, emotions and thought. And this appreciation is what, in this novel, as in so many others, King triumphantly achieves. It is a book which extends and deepens our understanding. Perhaps it is necessary to add that it is also very enjoyable. Francis King has often — too often perhaps — been called ‘a writer’s writer’. No doubt he is that, if only because other novelists are best able to recognise his mastery of technique and the difficulties he has surmounted. But he is surely a reader’s writer too, if the reader is one who seeks from fiction not only entertainment, which he certainly provides, but also enlightenment.
