Jim Hunter's seventh and most recent novel, Percival and the Presence of God (1978), marks an apparent change of direction in his work as a novelist. The earlier novels focus on the pressures of family life, whether between the generations, between husband and wife, or between adolescent friends and lovers. The settings of the first six novels are contemporary, moving from the 1950s in The Sun in the Morning (1961) through the 1960s and 1970s and including an interest in changing societies that runs parallel to the domestic concerns of the main narrative. But in Percival and the Presence of God Hunter moves beyond the mainly realistic conventions of his earlier work into a mythic world of Arthurian legend. The nonnaturalistic elements present in the earlier novels (highly wrought passages of poetic description, fragmentation of the narrative through shifts in time or perspective, and careful patterns of image and symbol...