Winston Graham is a good, even an excellent historical novelist—though we are made continually aware that he is as adept at cunning maneuvers and his approximations remain approximations. In his new novel, "The Grove of Eagles," he does not wrestle with the angel; the fire of the past does not burn very brightly. He goes about the task of describing Elizabethan England with a scholar's load of proper mischief. He has soaked himself in local lore, knows his history, his towns, the shape of the vanished land; he has read the account books, and he can follow his people through the daily round, hour by hour and minute by minute.

Something is still missing. We are never completely convinced that it happened as he says it happened; the blaze of conviction is absent. One needs a kind of perversity in order to make the leap: one must...