The action of this careful, complex novel [The Virgin in the Garden] takes place in Yorkshire in Coronation year. Its theme is growing up, coming of age, tasting knowledge. For the leading characters 1953 becomes the year that is to define their temperaments and shape the future….

Each of the six characters caught up in these dramas is pushed to extremity, forced by change, chance and exigency to come to terms with his or her intellectual or sexual being. This is an ambitious novel, heightened by calculated exaggeration. The stories, skilfully alternated, are linked by cunning echoes and symbolic commentary. The narration everywhere displays knowledge and intelligence.

But the intelligence proves a weakness as well as a strength. The author's commitment is to her ideas rather than to the imaginative life her story is apparently intended to have. She obliges her characters to speak and enact what her themes...