[Winter Garden] challenges the reader to catch clues to its tone, and also to what is actually supposed to be happening. It is, in fact, a bit baffling. The story is of a decent but very dull, virtually frozen man [Ashburner], who tells his wife he is going to Scotland for a rest, but instead goes off to Russia on a sponsored trip with some artists, including Nina, wife of a brain surgeon, with whom he is having (after many years of boring marital fidelity) an unsatisfactory affair. The Winter Garden is, primarily, a flowerless London backyard, but the title, like the cunningly-written opening chapter, requires to be taken rather carefully….
A dose of clap, and the pills to cure it, pass round the little party; this little plot is of course subsidiary to the main one, which is a conspiracy against Ashburner, or anyway looks like that. Meanwhile we have a record of the bureaucratic muddles and general bizarrerie of Russian life. There are some good jokes and some not so good …, a lot of local colour, and plenty of odd behaviour, some potentially sinister and some not. (p. 18)
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