To those acquainted with Henry Arthur Jones' Michael and His Lost Angel and Albert Camus' The Fall, Incense to Idols will not be unfamiliar. Like the former, though at greater length, it examines the symbiosis between sinner and saint. Like the latter, but the utterance feminine now, it employs the first-person form of the novel of confession.

This does not mean, however, that it is a potpourri of predecessors. Inescapably personal in approach, it has a latitude and longitude of its own, and though it is sometimes perfervid, over-symbolic, somewhat Pelagian ("sin achieves a more profound depth in its ugliness than sanctity in its pleasantness"), it is an original creation. (p. 292)

Like Spinster, Miss Ashton-Warner's previous novel, Incense to Idols carries weight on several levels. One surely, considering today's obsession with sex, is that it is never salacious in its many references to free-living. Another, no doubt, is...