While the Great War goes on, and wives desert and die, a father and son, deep in the New Zealand 'backblocks,' exchange letters in the style of Gibbon, Hooker and Sir Thomas Browne on the advisability of investment in the cinema business, on the decay of the English language, on Love (17th-century style) and on the intricacies of theology. The Reverend Bohun makes small-hours trips in his nightgown to the bedrooms of successive housekeepers, while his son Jeremy pilfers the petty cash from the local council office where he is employed as County Clerk and assaults his frigid wife with lyrical hymns on the poetry of true love. Lapped in the luxury of a literary style they can't afford, the two central characters in Frank Sargeson's new novel Joy of the Worm, become so possessed by their pretensions that they entirely blot out the scrawny realities of...