Frye's Bible

There are advantages to writing a review that will appear several months after the book one is discussing has been published. One can assume that the latter will have been read by all those likely to be interested, and that they, like oneself, will have gone beyond first impressions to afterthoughts. That makes it unnecessary to describe what the author is trying to do; one can take it as understood and proceed to what in the long run is more important—to discuss the book in relation to its cultural context and to the author's general body of work. The latter is particularly important when the book is a late work with a testamentary flavour—as is the case with Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature.