Word: maitlands
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...like high-tension wires, when he takes his emotional temperature every other minute, when he steps into the spotlight and throws a nightlong temper tantrum, the dramatic results are explosively and corrosively alive. Whether it be Jimmy Porter (Look Back in Anger), or Archie Rice (The Entertainer), or Bill Maitland (Inadmissible Evidence), Osborne's personal mouthpiece always screams out his rage, scorn, self-pity and impotence so that an audience is held in a vise of attention. What Osborne has been able to find in himself is an astonishingly concrete symbol of the times. As Mary McCarthy once noted...
...written attempts to limit the powers of the English King and to set forth the rights of his subjects. Lord Bryce, the historian, has described it as "the starting point in the constitutional history of the English race." In The History of English Law, Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland go even further. Magna Carta, they write, is "the nearest approach to an irrepealable 'fundamental statute' that England has ever...
...Maitland, God is not so much a presence as an "absence in the heart," and faith is a yearning to fill the void. His natural enemies in the faith are the Irish dogmatists for whom God is not an unknowable otherness but a "kinsman" -in his most ignoble form honorary president of an Irish friendly society. The ecclesiastical embodiment of the dogmatist faith is Dr. Costello, a clerical bully who heads the House of Studies and, perhaps prophetically, grows to bishop-size before the reader's eyes...
Costello is not a mean man by his own fixed lights. Even when presiding over an ecclesiastical kangaroo court that is investigating a nun suspected of heresy, he is not lacking in charity but in imagination. It can be seen that the nun on trial has grace; Maitland seeks it and Dr. Costello believes that he is already blessed with...
...Father Maitland's dilemma is intricately worked out like a fine, stout piece of convent lace. In the process, the author shows himself as a dealer in the comedy of the spirit far different from Graham Greene's celebrated psychodramas of doubt, doom and-damnation. His scenes are as funny as J. F. Powers', but without their cozy in-joke comicality. Keneally's humor is white, not black-a blessed relief. His book is infused with a pawky clerical awareness that human life, though sometimes capable of holiness, is more often merely funny. Thus perceptively armed...