The Burial is an unmistakable first novel; self-indulgently personal, unevenly written, quivering with emotion but also attractively alive; and the product of a genuine desire to write for its own sake. Miss Lash is capable of a real over-ripe badness which comes only either with the cynicism of a very long practice or the naivety of none at all: "how beautiful, how almost byzantine the sky was", "we're about to be married, this ceremony. . .this rite is the right of all men", "ahead the days of summer sleep, present but unpresented", are all turns of phrase which Miss Lash's later books will hardly be able to afford to carry.
On the other
hand she has observed some childish impressions with really beautiful clarity
("I remember the stairs, the white paint was blistered; we used to press
the blisters till they burst like seaweed") and she succeeds in carrying
off her difficult central theme of a woman unable to recover from her mother's
early death, kept in a state of permanent childhood, always feeling herself
in a sane, adult and oppressively self-certain world. It would be
a pity if the conflict in Miss Lash's literary personality ended in a victory
for the squashy side.