However, the questions mount. Why are Irvine’s medical colleagues so uniformly awful, coarse, cynical careerists; and why do they dislike the tight-lipped Irvine so much? In the end, there are just too many questions unanswered; the terseness, the suggestiveness, is too often insufficiently developed.
Dartford Asylum is, or was, not only a real place but it contains in this novel well-known people, such as the poet and composer Ivor Gurney. He was committed there in December 1922. Gurney is described sympathetically enough, but when he shows Irvine his musical compositions they are described here as hopeless scrawls, sometimes even blank. As historical facts, these compositions are even now being worked over by scholars, and the best of the poems that Gurney wrote in Dartford between 1923 and 1926 are ones upon which his growing reputation is based. For years people have been working, successfully, to remove the distraction of ‘mad’ poet from Gurney, and to point out the brilliant freshness of his later work. A work of fiction is not to be held to historical account, but it is a pity, in a novel, to present a Gurney who could not possibly have written as in reality he did at that time.
The book ends with Gurney apparently exulting over the burning of beehives, and being accused of lack of pity. ‘So what if I had no pity left? So what? There was no shame in that, not after everything I’d been through and seen. No shame at all.’ The poems he was writing at the time, and for two or three years after, are filled precisely with that: pity for himself and for others.
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