["Dead"] is this novel's final word, and a familiar one to Beryl Bainbridge's readers. This time the death is prefigured by forebodings, so that it arouses empathy rather than that gasp of anomic glee jerked from us by her grimmer comedies. "Another Part of the Wood" … is less darkened by the dye of its author's particular sensibility than are some of her late books. Like them, however, it was a good read the first time round and is a better one now.

The main differences I detect between the new and old versions are cuts. Miss Bainbridge, enjoying the rare opportunity of revising with a decade's hindsight, has pruned with the skill one would expect from a writer for whom cutting is an intrinsic part of narrative technique. The satiric effects for which she is admired are often achieved by splicing together incongruous slices of life. People in...