SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Labour's Loves Lost.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (16 February 1992): 3, 9.

In the following review, Eder extols the strengths of A Landing on the Sun, calling the book a satirical examination of bureaucracies, academic institutions, and the differences between men and women.

Jessel, the archetypal British civil servant, sits in his regulation office in Whitehall: a desk, a hat rack, two chairs, a view across the air shaft, and files in a neat pile. It is his purely abstract kingdom. He is the perfect instrument, a samurai of administrative procedure, existing to be the cog between other cogs. He describes his nirvana, his entire absence from himself:

On the desk in front of me lie two human hands. They are alive but perfectly still. … These hands; and the crisp white shirtsleeves that lead away from them, are the only signs of me in the room. … Sometimes my...