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She seems to have returned from Mexico, short of surplus intellectual baggage, and in full possession of a literary style for which, for clarity and precision, is almost unique in contemporary English fiction. The dazzling images, the snatches of inconsequential dialogue and sharp staccato sentences remind one of the pointillist dots on a canvas by Seurat, their apparently arbitrary arrangement only becoming clear when the reader withdraws to contemplate the whole. In addition to which, Mrs Bedford never stoops to satire. She never makes use of those cheap ironic asides which are the stock-in-trade of the travelling writer. Her work is never touched with the fatal vein of facetiousness that spoils so much recent English literature. Even when expounding the murky history of Mexico - whether Cortez or the Emperor Maximillian of Juarez or the Marxist revolutionaries - she never moralises or scores a political point. What she does manage to communicate, here and in all her novels, is that everything is problematic; that all human life, in any of its shifting combinations, is infinitely fascinating; and that the human condition consists of millions and millions of people being tossed up and down the earth, trying vainly to connect, but somehow being prevented from doing so.
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A Visit to Don Otavio is a work which evokes that disturbing and paradoxical country as vividly as anything by D. H. Lawrence and, to my mind, far more vividly than Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. There's no point in trying to summarise the twists and trials and delicious surprises of the journey. But I am convinced that, once this wonderful book becomes better known, it will seem incredible that it could ever have gone out of print.