Geographically, the claustrophobic world inhabited for 80 years by Lewis and Benjamin Jones [in On the Black Hill] is close to that of Mary Webb's novels; thematically it is even closer…. Mr Chatwin is a better, because more fastidious, writer than Mary Webb; but the elements which are finest in her novels are also to be found in his: an ability to evoke country lives flowing, strong, dark and deep, through their narrow channels; a poetic sensitivity to landscapes changing with each change of season; and the born storyteller's knack of convincing one that these characters scraped their precarious livings, carried on their embittered feuds, triumphed or (more often) were thwarted in their violent passions, and had their momentary epiphanies of glory in precisely this manner and no other….

There are passages in the book when Mr Chatwin edges perilously near to the cliff-edge of sentimentality and bathos….

But...