A Sense of Reality

Three short stories, and one which is actually a novella, are affiliated by their concern with the intangible and illusory and they sometimes cross over into less finite areas where reality is blurred by fantasy, memory and myth. In Under the Garden, the longest and strongest story here, a man completes a lifetime of wanderjahre around the world by making a shadowed return to the past of his childhood and an earlier experience both remembered and imagined. A Visit to ??Morin turns another man back to the Catholic writer who had once influenced him-?? man all but forgotten who has written away his faith and now lives in the fear of his total disaffection. The Dream of a Strange Land converts the home of a ??once eminent, now almost retired, doctor into a casino for a night. And in ??Discovery in the Woods four youngsters search for, find, and eventually mourn "a whole world lost" - both past and present... The stories are individually variable in calibre and consequence but collectively they engage in a reconnaissance through the dustier reaches of man's experience with its spectres of doubt, default, failure and paradox. These serious overtones qualify the collection as more than light entertainment, which it also is, although it may ultimately prove to be only peripheral as a part of this writer's permanent collection. (Kirkus Reviews)