I read this book with muted enjoyment, and then it vanished into the detritus of my study, never to be seen again. On the cover it had a photograph from the television series that was made of the book in the 1990s. It showed the actor Douglas Hodge, looking youthful and immaculate in a pale three piece suit that I took to be Edwardian. I can't quite imagine which character from the novel he played, but in any case if I ruled the world I would ban all photographs from film or television adaptations from the covers of books.
Mind you, the picture did remind me that the one decent thing about the recent load of rubbish that was the mini-series The Undoing was all too briefly seeing Douglas Hodge, playing a relatively inexpensive New York lawyer.
But back to the book. I mildly enjoyed it, to about the rather tepid level that I enjoyed the last Angus Wilson I read. I did admire its wide panorama of characters - and who could fail to respect a novelist who christens one of his characters Mrs Salad? All the same, some among the cast were not entirely believable, even when the reader takes into account Wilson's taste for the grotesque - Elvira and Inge particularly didn't convince me.
In the end, I didn't care as much as I ought to have about any of it and since I don't have the book beside me, to refer to and quote freely from to support any arguments I might muster, I am simply going to provide to an assessment of the novel by a much wiser blogger than I.
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