The Blaze of Noon is a remarkable and original book. It is the story of a phase in the life of a blind man which, though it is an astonishing tour de force, possesses a depth and certainty of the kind which one does not associate with books whose distinction lies in their brilliance. It is a book of which, whether one likes it or not, time will not change one's opinion, for it is not tied to the tastes of a decade; unlike the average English novel of today, written and read within defined social boundaries, it might as effectively have been written in another language and given an alien setting, it will not date, and a reader coming to it in ten years' time will be in just as good a position to appreciate it or criticise it as a reader now…. The originality of the...