The Wooden Shepherdess is the second instalment of Richard Hughes's long historical novel, The Human Predicament, of which the first volume, The Fox in the Attic, was published in 1961. So long a gap in publication presents the reader with its own difficulties, particularly as The Human Predicament is designed, Mr Hughes tells us, as a single continuous novel, and not as a trilogy or a quartet…. The most a reviewer can do, therefore, in considering the present volume, is to report progress, rather than pass any final judgment. For Mr Hughes is a very conscious and deliberate artist, and if there are certain episodes in the present volume whose significance we do not entirely grasp, we can be confident that it will not be concealed by the time the novel is completed.

The first thing to say, perhaps, is that Mr Hughes triumphantly surmounts the difficulties he has...