A sane cuckoo in the nest of art

This is a hugely impressive but somewhat exhausting book, the justification for which — from a brutally commercial viewpoint — I fail to grasp. It is a collection of Sir Frank Kermode’s literary criticism, selected by the author and drawn chronologically from all periods and aspects of his oeuvre. Short prefaces, outlining genesis and context, precede 19 essays (some of them lectures, some of them chapters from full-length works), followed by seven briefer articles, taken from the London Review of Books.

In libraries if not in bookshops, the great majority of these pieces are readily available in their original published form, where they make better sense — Kermode’s arguments are so delicate and complex that they do not comfortably stand out of context. I cannot believe that this anthology will have broad appeal outside the university: the age of the bedside or armchair literary amateur is long gone. In other words, who is this book for, and who will buy it?

Still, one should not sound ungrateful. Perhaps the publishers wished to pay someone whom the blurb trumpets as ‘the greatest literary scholar of his generation’ a disinterested compliment as he embarks on his ninth decade — very handsome of them, if so. And the book is hardly trivial: its 400 pages, richly charged with scholarship and wisdom, offer a bracingly strenuous journey through rocky but never arid intellectual terrain.

‘Most criticism is now produced on academic assembly lines and is usually derivative, mechanical and very hard to read,’ says Kermode at the start. As someone who seems never to have written an inelegant or otiose sentence in his life, he can be allowed the jibe. His own style is supple, urbane, perhaps a little dandyish in its unflustered tolerant consideration of all sides of a question.