Although Julian Mitchell now regards himself as a playwright and dramatist, during the 1960s he proved himself a novelist of very considerable interest. The author of at least two fine novels, The White Father (1964) and The Undiscovered Country (1968), he acquired a modest cult following on both sides of the Atlantic. This was partly the result of the way in which the later novel, his last to date, an experimental combination of autobiography and fantasy, confronts very explicitly some characteristic contemporary problems of the genre in its claim to be truthful or "realistic." In his one published excursion into literary theory (the text of a lecture entitled Truth and Fiction, delivered at the Royal Institute of Philosophy in 1972), Mitchell has written perceptively about these problems. Very much a professional writer, he is skeptical of academic literary criticism, particularly some of its structuralist varieties, yet he has worked frequently enough...