[On the Black Hill] disconcerts expectation; something one imagines by now this author very much enjoys doing. After the harshly and brilliantly exotic expanses of In Patagonia and The Viceroy of Ouidah, [Chatwin] has elected to study a few square miles of hill-farm in Radnorshire, and the lives of the twin brothers who farm it.

The writing has the emblematic self-sufficiency of the late David Garnett's. The sense of place is flawlessly invoked, usually in paragraphs of only a few lines …; but the necessary presence of the practical is never neglected….

The mixture of the possible and the unlikely with the laconically lyrical is very much in David Garnett's peculiar vein. So is the humour, which gets in everywhere …; and so is the author's amusing himself by pretending to be a loyal slave of the accidental, while in fact he is magisterially pulling all the strings. Anyone who...