Weirdly tensed between being a kind of earnest variant on Kingsley Amis's The Green Man and a Hammer Film version of that novel too cheerful by half over its fetchingly plasticated foliage and stage-managed bumps in the darkened churchyardset, The Girl Green as Elderflower makes a strikingly odd brew. In it an old-seeming youth called Crispin Clare is to be found recovering from a never-specified but direly hintful collapse in some vaguely tropical corner of our former colonial holdings…. Allegedly, he is helping himself therapeutically along by weaving his chums and relations into versions of medieval Suffolk legends which he is writing out in the run-down but distantly ancestral Suffolk cot he is currently crashing in. An unlikely story, you will feel.

And yet it is a story that is tuned to translate with a fine convincingness the natural world. "God's garden", a medieval priest calls it. And...