SOURCE: Sutherland, John. “On the Salieri Express.” London Review of Books 14, no. 18 (24 September 1992): 18–20.

In the following excerpt, Sutherland finds flaws in what he sees as the “formulaic plot” and thinly-veiled sentimentality of Written on the Body.

When Roy Campbell's wife was seduced by the voracious Vita Sackville-West the poet went to his friend C. S. Lewis expecting sympathy. Lewis's reaction on being told of the episode was fascinated silence followed by the brutal exclamation: ‘Fancy being cuckolded by a woman!’ Campbell's male pride never recovered. Sixty years later the idea still seems odd to me. Written on the Body takes the most familiar of fiction's triangles—husband, wife, seducer—but in this case the seducer of the wife is a woman. Despite an overpoweringly confessional manner (the novel is written as the seducer's intimate journal), she never discloses her name. One says ‘her’ name, but neither is the...