Yet despite excellent characteriza tions and some of Warren's more impressive writing, World Enough and Time might benefit from some judicious editing and a tighter narrative technique. Although it is a very serious novel, rather than a pretentious potboiler (as some of Warren's critics have claimed), its length and the exasperating nature of the tragic hero make it less than an unqualified success.

Warren's narrative technique in World Enough and Time is adumbrated in All the King's Men by Cass Mastern's narrative, which is related in Mastern's florid nineteenth-century rhetoric, followed by Jack Burden's sardonic modernist commentary on it. Similarly, in World Enough and Time, Warren's narrative voice, alternately descriptive, compassionate, and sardonic, is played off against the romantic rhetoric of Beaumont's own narrative (a fictitious one created by Warren of course) of his life and crime. However, it is in the use of these dual voices that...