The characters Bernice Rubens creates in her novels generally feel violently and venomously and on a grand scale. Their emotions are "urgent", "deep", "strange", and their natures divided and contradictory….

[The] principal theme of most of her novels [is] the grotesque contrast between the familiar, predictable surfaces of life and the madness, hatred and suffering underlying them. In Sunday Best there was an effective, chilling tension between the narrator's account of his compulsive and extraordinary nature and the bland picture offered of him by someone else. [In Go Tell the Lemming] there is no such tension … The poison poured so carefully into [the] Doppelgänger's ready ear spreads to infect the novel's cast and episodes, so that the reader is bereft of any focus likely to inspire pity or understanding.

"Not in the Script," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1973; reproduced from The Times Literary...