{"id":8410,"date":"2019-05-14T08:58:51","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T08:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/martinblack.com\/?p=8410"},"modified":"2019-05-14T08:59:55","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T08:59:55","slug":"the-run-of-night-peter-de-polnay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/2019\/05\/the-run-of-night-peter-de-polnay\/","title":{"rendered":"The Run of Night
Peter de Polnay"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part of the Peter de Polnay project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

P<\/span>ublished in 1963, Polnay’s 33rd novel opens at a dinner party in a village in Sussex and trudges mournfully to a close near Beachy Head.<\/p>\n

I’ll let the steamy precis on the flyleaf (somewhat misleadingly) explain:
\n\"run
\nI laughed at the Kinsey<\/a> wink-wink, nudge-nudge reference, remember, this is the dawn of the so-called ‘swinging sixties’.<\/p>\n

Run of the Night<\/strong> is not a good book and on more than one occasion I checked to see how many pages remained for reading.\u00a0 If it were not for this project I would have abandoned the work, it was a relief to arrive at the final page. The prose is wooden and clunky, the characters are uninspired and uninteresting.<\/p>\n

The novelist B. S. Johnson<\/a> reviewed the novel in the Spectator (13\/12\/1963) and was damming:<\/p>\n

On almost every page of The Run of Night there are faults of sentence construction, punctuation, or grammar, this is the kind of novel which reads as though it was never revised (let alone proof-read), and which makes this viewer itch to correct it with a red pen like a schoolchild’s essay. Its banal plot concerns a frightened wife who escapes her husband\u2019s suicidal car journey only to undergo a peripatetic night in wildest Sussex encountering various dreary and unconvincing eccentrics. It seems difficult to imagine good reasons for writing, publishing, or buying this book.<\/p>\n