Cover photography by Elliot Erwitt. Bad Moon Rising, ed. New Worlds Quarterly 4, ed. It requires considerable artistic skill to induce in the reader attitudes of compassion and disquiet through the immediate presentation of speech, thought and action. The Dickensian tradition approves the frequent intervention of the author as moralist, nudging the reader, putting the required words in his mouth He is working in a tradition nearly as venerable but far healthier - the naturalistic one, in which judgement is implied but never made the theme of a sermon.
Violence holds the centre here and has a hard light trained on it.
It is an aspect of city life we are forced to look at unflinching, but nowhere in the detailed descriptions is there a trace of that gratuitous elaboration which betrays fascinated gloating and invites it in the reader. But his concern is not only with the horrifying fusion of sexuality with violence that is part of sick civilisations. We look round at this great modern city, with its triumphs of technology, and wonder when it will achieve the ennoblement of man. We are a long way past Wellsian optimism. The triumphs of physics, chemistry and engineering are tacitly taken for granted.