[Palace without Chairs] starts as a what's-going-on, develops into a what's-it-all-about and ends as a so-what. It's a modishly fanciful piece about a palace revolution in a never-never land called Evarchia, where none of the dying King's heirs is willing or able to succeed him. Full of sharp details and elegantly written, it's largely composed of interminably proliferating fantasy sequences long out-Pythoned. There is a Meaning, of course, revealed in advance on the jacket but otherwise available, as the blurb promises, to the persistent reader….

Brophy calls it 'A Baroque Novel', and the title and epigraphs come from works by her art-historian husband. The trouble with analogies between painting and literature, of course, is that paintings—however rich in narrative content or intricately decorative—have an immediate completeness of impact which the tantalising serialism of fiction denies. (p. 566)

Jeremy Treglown, in New Statesman (© 1978 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co...