Blaming is Elizabeth Taylor's last novel, completed shortly before her death. And death is the dominant theme: not the experience of facing death oneself, but the ways in which the living face the deaths of those they know. Blaming oneself, blaming others—these are easy, available, but destructive responses. In this novel, the living are shown to be indeed responsible in some sense for two deaths; but the argument is that such responsibility must not and cannot be borne if life is to go on….

Elizabeth Taylor has written a book about guilt and its overcoming in which all the characters are ordinary, selfish muddlers. There are no epiphanies here, and no teachers; just the everyday accommodation of pain. In this she is reminiscent of Muriel Spark: neither writer seeks a solution in goodness, that fabled and irrelevant state, neither subscribes to a notion of progress. The effect...