SOURCE: Barnes, Anne. “Exact and Eccentric.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 3889 (24 September 1976): 1198.

In the following review of The High Tide Talker, Barnes derides Davie for creating weak characters in her stories.

Elspeth Davie's The High Tide Talker is more concerned with eccentricity. Here the short story form is used, not as a focus on familiar details of personality, but as an excuse for contorting situations and pressing them into strange new shapes. As a result her characters are affected and unlikely but also oddly predictable. Often they are promising as ideas, like the landlady whose lodger is averse to eggs, or the irate mother of a child whose favourite toy has been lost, or the man who goes out looking for reality because his colour television has broken down, but they are all clumsily handled.

The least ambitious stories are the most successful. There is one about a man...