[James Hanley] is an example of a novelist who has often aimed at a poetic type of fiction, restricting the social range of his work in his quest for intensity and significant form. He has undoubtedly pursued his art with dedication and integrity, and although he has elicited few displays of enthusiastic acclaim he has rightly won a great deal of respect for his artistic purity. Of his two books recently published, the reissued The Welsh Sonata (1954) is much more conspicuously poetic than the less ambitious and less pretentious A Kingdom, but despite being more conventionally realistic this new novel also strives towards the poetic. Neither novel contains much in the way of narrative, but The Welsh Sonata is more extreme in this respect…. As the title indicates, the structure of the book is analogous to the three-movement form of the classical sonata, and the subtitle Variations on...