Penelope Fitzgerald's first novel [The Golden Child] is a small, benign thriller set in a London museum. It has an amiable, mostly baffled hero, who worries about his mortgage and his absentee wife, and an assortment of absurdities, excesses and enthusiasms which variously constitute and congeal into characters. There are traces throughout The Golden Child of a mildly sinister comedy about 'the pride and bitter jealousy which is the poetry of museum-keeping', where pointed references to the availability of conservation poisons, plaster-grinders and large incinerators spice the gloom of ancient inter-Departmental rivalries and enliven the damply cheerful crowds of visitors. Unfortunately, this aspect is under heavy siege from an over-inflated plot…. It brings in its wake a trail of recognisable grotesques, yet the book would have been neater and more credible with fewer obvious snipes and sparkier with fewer weighty intrigues.

Susannah Clapp, "Suburbanity," in New Statesman (© 1977 The...