A reader’s writer

Some people say that nothing happens to them, but everything happens to the writer who sees the world around him as material for fiction. Francis King is such a writer, which explains why he has been able to go on writing novels and stories for longer than many of his readers and indeed publishers have been alive.

When someone who brought out his first book in 1946 while an Oxford undergraduate publishes a novel as good, fresh, intelligent and moving as Cold Snap more than 60 years later, it is almost inevitable that reviewers should remark on his extraordinary literary longevity and his seemingly inexhaustible vitality. And yet this is, in all ways but one, beside the point. To dwell on his age is invidious and misleading. This is not a remarkable novel for a man in his middle eighties to have written. It is quite simply a remarkable novel.