SOURCE: “Wilfully Waffling,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 21, 1980, p. 326.

In the following review, Scannell finds Legends of the Fall to be a horribly written book.

“Legends of the Fall” is the title-story of a volume containing three novellas by Jim Harrison who, the blurb tells us, “has already won literary acclaim in the States for his poetry and novels”. The jacket also carries some extracts from admiring American reviewers of the book, including these words from that notable arbiter of literary excellence, Playboy: “These three novellas are so good and so well crafted, it's a little scary … You have to be very goddamned good to write that way.”

It is perhaps worth quoting the opening sentence of the first of the stories, “Revenge”: “You could not tell if you were a bird descending (and there was a bird descending, a vulture) if the naked man was dead or...