Maintaining critical distance when writing literary criticism is not a matter of principle with me; I can’t conceive of doing it another way. It seems from his preface that Alexander both personally admires and is daunted by Murray, but that what he was principally afraid of was Murray withdrawing the right to quote him. In his anxiety to please and his fear of not being allowed to publish, Alexander has produced a portrait that has this reader, for one, shivering with repudiation.

Anchored in a sense of the present’s dependence on the past, her best work has been characterised by exemplary clarity, restraint and tact. Predominantly elegiac in tone, mood shifts have rarely jolted her meditative, unpressured pace. Qualities I once described in a 1985 essay on her work as ‘reclusive grace’, distinctly unmodern in her considerate refusal to invade, ‘wanting the light and sorry for the dark.’

The plot is simple, but the narration of the novel is remarkable. Carey’s prose recreates the style of a man with little formal schooling and it foregoes many standard grammatical features, such as commas. The effect is impressive. Thoughts and actions are yoked together in a single sentence so as to create a tremendous sense of narrative urgency. Every sentence has so much material squeezed into it that it seems ready to burst apart at the seams.

My impression of Murray’s critical reception is that it is partly based on laziness: critics don’t want to deal with him. They don’t want to argue, don’t want the bad light the poems put them in as adversaries: politically correct (how unsexy) and less mobile verbally than the poet himself.