Dannie Abse's Some Corner of an English Field … suffers, I kept feeling, from the characteristically second-novel lack of an urgently felt action. Its theme is topical: the Outsider—what is he, why is he, where is he to go, the intellectual among middlebrows, the Jew among Christians, the non-acceptor? Henderson, a young doctor in the RAF, gets involved, through fondness and pity more than love, with the wife of a decent, heart-diseased, impotent friend of his; then with a shaggy girl … who seems to provide an escape from the smug hierarchical society of the Services; and leaves them both, feeling 'outside' both the conventional and the rebellious. What else is there for him? The question is unanswered. Mr. Abse writes well—movingly, sharply, raising even trifles into interest with a peculiar soundness and freshness of observation, a kind of spiritual integrity that enriches even his rather skimpy material...