Beryl Bainbridge's funny and alarming [novel, Winter Garden,] sentences its hero—who is, by his own complacent admission, 'ordinary and boring'—to a course of accidental dislocation and anxious self-investigation. He wanders out of his marriage, pretending that he's off to fish in Scotland: instead, motivelessly, he flies to Russia with his elusive and erratic mistress who soon after they arrive unaccountably disappears.

Beryl Bainbridge's is a world of paranoid comedy, where nothing can be trusted to work, where the routine which used to govern the novel is grotesquely involuted or else suspended. Her hero's destination is significant, because the official Russia which the characters—junketing artists—visit is a society where the individual's will and his control of his own experience have been removed from him, and where an obfuscating bureaucracy turns the most elementary manoeuvre into a mystery—a society of politically imposed absurdism. Her deconstellated...