Ever since [Olivia Manning's] first novel, The Wind Changes, appeared in 1937, she has possessed an exceedingly pure and exact style, together with what one thinks of as a painter's eye for the visible world, that has enabled her to render particularly well the sensual surface of landscape and places…. It is a prose and an eye that seem accurately to take the measure of things. Yet this exactness of rendition, when applied to human beings, has sometimes seemed to have a diminishing effect, as of a lowering of vitality, a sense of Gissing-like hopelessness in the face of life. One felt this in A Different Face (1957), in which a man returns to Coldmouth, a town on the south coast of England, only to discover that the money he had invested in a private school there has been lost. The name of the place, vividly and chillingly described as...