Reading a Beryl Bainbridge novel has always been a special kind of experience, at once very funny, abrasive and intimate—rather like having a nasty sticking-plaster pulled off for you by an old friend: jokes, and the little unpleasantness briskly but tenderly dealt with, then drinks of relief all around. This new novel [Winter Garden] burns a good deal deeper than that; there is a minor operation to be performed, and drinks may be needed long before the end, as disquiet seeps in. If this writer's metaphors are ranged between "warm", as in, say, The Bottle Factory Outing, and "cold", as in Young Adolf, then Winter Garden opens and enters quite new and freezing latitudes, where even comedy fails to comfort.

The action concerns Ashburner (one need only optionally, and afterwards, seek any significance in the name), a conservative Londoner—an Admiralty lawyer indeed, he somewhere says—who...