Product Description

Setter, an eminent Harley Street consultant, is trusted and admired by his circle of friends, devoting himself to the rehabilitation of the lonely and the misunderstood. But deep within himself Setter recognizes a latent streak of sadistic cruelty which enables him to perceive the truth about a delinquent youth whom he suspects of having taken part in a particularly repellent and senseless crime. It is for Setter to choose a punishment and enforce it. An Error of Judgement is a subtle study of human weakness and conflict. Partly a wry social comedy and partly a study in good and evil, it is brilliantly written and observed, assured and skilful, a truly modern work by one of the most underrated novelists of the last century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1070241 in Books
• Published on: 1987-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Review
Pamela Hansford Johnson, who died in 1981, is now better remembered for a brief engagement to Dylan Thomas than for her own remarkable talents as a writer. This cool, sinister book is saturated in a Christianity that once formed the framework of ordinary English lives and now seems as distantly exotic as the rites of the Amahuaca tribe. It tells the story of Setter, a Harley Street physician who seems a reassuring, even a saintly, figure. Not so. He confesses to Vic, a former patient and the novel's narrator, that inside he is 'extremely dirty' and prey to tormentingly sadistic fantasies. Marriage unravelling, his sanity at risk, Setter becomes fixated on Sammy, a teddy boy who claims to have killed someone. Set in the 1960s, at a moment of interface between the past and the recognisably modern world, this exquisitely controlled novel is driven by terror of the social fragmentation that would come once a commonly held belief in damnation - conjured, in a potent blending of the domestic and divine, as a 'subterranean sun' burning a thousand miles beneath the lino - ceased to exert its moral hold. --Olivia Laing, The Guardian, May 1st 2008

Review
`One of the best novels in English since 1939.'

About the Author
Pamela Hansford Johnson was born into a theatrical family in south London in 1912. She was educated at Clapham County Girls Secondary School. After leaving school at the age of 16, she took a secretarial course and worked for several years in the London branch of an American bank. She began her literary career by writing poems. In 1933, Pamela wrote to Dylan Thomas, and a friendship developed. Marriage was considered, but the idea abandoned. In 1936 she married Australian writer Gordon Neil and In 1950 C.P. Snow. Her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, was published in 1935, inaugurating a long and varied career as a published author of fiction, essays and plays. Her other books include the `Dorothy Merlin' trilogy (The Unspeakable Skipton, 1959; Night and Silence, Who is Here, 1962; and Cork Street, Next to the Hatter's, 1965), The Humbler Creation (1959) and The Good Listener (1975), and works of criticism on Thomas Wolfe and Ivy Compton-Burnett. She held visiting academic positions at American universities including Wesleyan and Yale. She reviewed and broadcast extensively. In 1975 she received the CBE. She dies in 1981. The foreword writer, Ann Widdecombe, was shadow home secretary from 1998 to 2001. She earned a reputation as one of Britain's liveliest and most direct politicians. Her achievements outside politics include becoming a popular novelist, as well as presenting television programmes. Ann Widdecombe, a devout Catholic, has a life-long love for G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown adventures.

Customer Reviews

A Moral, Psychological Novel
It was Ann Widdecombe who recommended to me Pamela Hansford Johnson's novels - not that I often talk books with the former Tory prisons minister turned novelist, in fact this was the only time, at the Hay festival the year before last, but I do like to name-drop on the rare occasions when I can. She was replying to a question (from me) about her favorite writers, and mentioned this woman of whom I had to admit I had never heard. She wasn't surprised, but commented what a shame it was that Hansford Johnson is now so little known. The name obviously stuck in my mind because when I saw this book a few weeks ago I decided to give it a go, and I'm glad I did. This is seriously good stuff, a really excellent novel, assured and satisfying. I said "assured", because that was the word that kept rising to the top of my mind when reading the book. It's skilfully constructed. The first-person narrative viewpoint is cleverly chosen, the narrator being close to events but (I realised later on reflection) not as central to them as at it seems in the reading, which just shows how well the author has succeeded in her artifice. As a proximate spectator he can credibly be used to comment on events and other characters in a way a third-person narrator can't, in such a typically modern and realistic a novel as this. The way we get to know the narrator's wife Jenny, Dr. William Setter and his wife Emily, and others, is subtly conditioned by the narrator's partial insights and obviously this influences the way we respond to them. The point of narration moves about a fair bit too, though, in a way that feels very contemporary: more than one other character breaks in to relate stories of their own that are very lightly framed; and that's not the only narrative trick in the book. The way the narrator's work colleague Lawson is introduced is deliberately playful, for example. But this is a serious story, by no means packed with action but rather with moral and social content, really gripping the reader and building up a lot of momentum: I took only two evenings to read it, anyway. At the same time room is allowed for characters to develop who are as convincing and surprising as E.M. Forster would have wanted them. Setter is at the centre of the novel, an almost magical figure, a wise man who seems to control, and practically to dominate both men and women without being at all domineering; a smooth private doctor well set up in life who gives up status and money, allowing himself to become shabbily dressed and personally chaotic in order to satisfy his moral and selfish drives. An eccentric, an oddball even, but certainly a character who feels bigger than one novel, a really impressive creation. There's also Jenny, the narrator's wife, a woman who seems on the cusp between youth and middle age, the effect of whose grief is to set off one of the main narrative strands as she seems to fall in and out of love more than once, perhaps even more than twice. And there's the vicar, Malpas, and intelligent and questioning but ultimately good man with all the limits that that implies; there's the narrator himself, whose ordered pessimism about relationships creates the overall mood of the novel, more phlegmatic than melancholic, but in any event decidedly clear-eyed about human nature. Perhaps it's understandable that this kind of writing would appeal to political conservatives: it seems to say that social institutions and relations are as good as they can be, given that people are so deeply flawed. Finally there's Emily, Setter's unfaithful, partly comprehending and somehow still loyal American wife. She's highly sexually attractive to both men and women, both physically -hers is the the main phyisical presence in the book, her big legs seeming constantly to be gathered in front of her - and in other ways, the fun, friendship and sex she offers contrasting sharply with the intense spiritual concern and agression coming from elsewhere. More broadly the novel is quite interested in the nature of attraction, it seems to me. All the other characters are attracted to Setter but we also explore the nature of the narrator's sometimes ambivalent attraction to his wife, attraction between men, its denial and its mischaracterisation as sexual, and the way attraction can develop between those who feel somehow isolated. What also matters in this book, though, is the nature of evil, and cruelty, and the relationship of these to goodness: these, it seems, can sometimes meet in an unavoidable personal imperative. In some way the book reminds me of the early Iris Murdoch. There's the central, fascinating figure, the variable geometry of relationships, the deep interest in why and how people try to do good, in the way some individuals are held in thrall by others, and in the way they seek psychological freedom or sometimes have it thrust on them against their will. But any influence may have been by Hansford Johnson on Murdoch of course, as much as the other way round, given that Hansford Johnson's writing career was established earlier. As I say, a satisfying read, this, and certainly one that has persuaded me that I ought to read more of Hansford Johnson, obviously an underrated writer.