Reading [The Survival of the Fittest] is a curious experience; vague and casual from moment to moment, it is nevertheless compulsive and cumulatively gripping. Its mood is elegiac: characters, places, periods, history, are evoked, suggested, rather than solidly dramatic. There are moments of drama—Polly's terror, the richly amoral Georgina's blank and intense misery over a one-page divorce, her convincing and detailed discovery after remarrying her husband of a sexual satisfaction that precludes the need for further exploration.

But events are subordinated to a sense of the long emotional shifts and structures of whole lives, and the group's corporate life. All the time tone and style are muted, close to cliché, never sharp. In her wartime trilogy Pamela Hansford Johnson created in precise detail a whole world of black market, shell shock, rationing, requisitioning, button-polishing. Here she builds with a few light touches, appealing to the memory of...