Eliot said of another difficult novel, Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood” (1936), “Only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.” After “Ulysses” and “Mrs.
“No matter the reservations held then - as to methods and morals and about the various groupings that came into operation or which from the outset already had been in operation no matter too, that for us, in our community, on ‘our side of the road,’ the government here was the enemy, and the police here was the enemy, and the government ‘over there’ was the enemy, and the soldiers from ‘over there’ were the enemy, and the defender-paramilitaries from ‘over the road’ were the enemy and, by extension - thanks to suspicion and history and paranoia - the hospital, the electricity board, the gas board, the water board, the school board, telephone people and anybody wearing a uniform or garments easily to be mistaken for a uniform also were the enemy, and where we were viewed in our turn by our enemies as the enemy - in those dark days, which were the extreme of days, if we hadn’t had the renouncers as our underground buffer between us and this overwhelming and combined enemy, who else, in all the world, would we have had?” Yet this drifting sentence, from, is representative of Burns’s narrative voice - the repetitions, the piling up of extraneous detail, the dashes within dashes, the sense she instills in her readers of craving verbs the way an animal craves salt: It’s poor form, probably, to insert a long quote this early in a review.
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