SOURCE: "Happiness and the Daily Round," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4585, February 15, 1991, p. 19.

Warner is an English novelist, nonfiction writer, and critic vhose scholarly works include Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981). In the following, she unfavorably reviews The Midnight Love Feast.

The lovers sculpted out of sand in the beach below Mont St Michel are lapped by the tide and eventually overwhelmed; their creator dances to the sweet unheard music of the "salty tongues" of the sea and exclaims at the beauty of the French word volubile. Nature abhors silence, he declares, and as they engulf his art, the waves represent new life, "a baby burbling in its cradle". [In The Midnight Love Feast] Yves and Nadège, who come across the sculptor on the shore, are long married and afflicted with silence; they feel the time has come to separate, and they decide...