The sub-title of [Polonaise] should read: 'Or the Wreck of the Titanic'. Like the Titanic, the greater part of this book is a magnificent piece of engineering, a product of intelligence, great technical skill and hard work. Also like the Titanic, when the journey has almost been completed, in fact as late as page 343, Read's finely constructed artefact, of which its creator has every reason to feel proud, hits an iceberg of such shattering banality that the reader is left at the end lik...

Read does not make much of a case for Catholicism, or for religion at all, in [his early novel, The Junkers]. He writes with apparent approval of those ex-Nazis who have repented and are now (the mid-1960s) working for a unified Europe even if the unity can only be achieved by the spread of Communist principles and power…. How far have Read's views changed since he wrote The Junkers? Neither author nor main character in Read's latest novel [A Married Man] seem to have any sympathies wit...

[In A Married Man] John Strickland finds the naked body of his wife, Clare, in the living-room of their country cottage and the corpse of her hitherto unsuspected lover in the bedroom upstairs [and] it gives him a nasty turn, especially as both have been demolished by shotgun blast. But he has set his heart on becoming a labour M.P. and is soon back at the hustings although warning his agent: 'I may be a little off form.' His form declines still further when he discovers that the super-rich mi...

Piers Paul Read tells a latter-day version of [Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych"] in "A Married Man."… The male menopause is a familiar enough modern story, yet this is not static feudal Russia but late bourgeois Britain in an age of decadent inconsistencies: it continues the practice of marriage while devaluing conventions and domesticity; it institutionalizes self-interest while thriving on middle-class guilt…. [Protagonist Strickland's] pursui...

Novels like Polonaise usually die at the outline stage. In skeletal form they impress everyone, not least the author; but as the appalling difficulty of actually writing them gradually emerges, there is a tendency to turn to other projects. Also, they fall uncomfortably between two stools: more than just another novel, but distinctly less than the masterpiece one will write some day. But there is a lingering attachment to the material—always a feeling that it could somehow be pushed and prodded into ...

The Great Train Robbery co-ordinated the actions of 15 highly idiosyncratic thugs. It was supported by scores, if not hundreds, of underworld 'supply troops'…. Therefore, one way of looking at this 1963 'crime of the century' is as an expression of London working-class culture…. This is one of the fascinating sidelights of Read's account [The Train Robbers], which he collected from the eager testimonies of the robbers who are out of prison…. Alas, like...

Mr. Read has outdone himself [in "A Married Man"], blending for the first time with absolute success his preoccupations with domestic, social and political upheavals, and creating as a result a story full of suspense and subtleties. [Some] readers will argue that there's not much suspense involved here. Because Mr. Read is composing a domestic drama he introduces a very limited number of characters. Therefore, it's immediately apparent who the killer must be. (p. 30)

The formula [for A Married Man] is familiar: a man of ordinary social dimensions is drawn inchmeal towards a pit of moral quicksand and then neatly pushed in. Usually the first step downward on this well-intentioned path is adultery, and so it is for Read's hero, John Strickland…. This might seem to militate against a suspenseful narrative, but in fact A Married Man, after a slow start, becomes a proper page-turner. In part this may be due to the fascination inherent in watching a prophecy ful...

[So] good is The Professor's Daughter, so intellectually engaging and compelling, that one must ask why this is not a novel of major importance instead of merely first-rate entertainment. It can be argued that its ending is contrived—contrived, moreover, to give aid and comfort to middle-class, anti-revolutionary values. And there is justification for such a view: The domestic settlements that end it do seem trivial in the light of the questions it has raised; thus the ending does seem forced....

"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Piers Paul Read's [The Villa Golitsyn] explores the implications of Forster's celebrated remark in a narrative of engrossing complexity…. In summary, the plot sounds like a Famous Five adventure peopled by drunks and sexual frustrates…. But Piers Paul Read tries to dignify the extravagant element in his novel by drawing a number of parallels...

In The Villa Golitsyn two old schoolfellows are invited to Willy Ludley's villa in Nice. Willy's wife Priscilla needs their help because Willy appears to be drinking himself to death…. Before [Simon Milson] goes to Nice he is asked by his Foreign Office boss to discover from Ludley whether or not he was responsible for [an] act of treason back in 1963. The other suspect, Baldwin, is up for an important job and his name needs to be cleared before he gets it. Simon, who has little integri...

Piers Paul Read's The Junkers is written in the first person, the narrator is roughly the same age as the author and the book is set in Germany where Read has lived, but you don't for a moment feel that he is dishing up a chunk of personal experience with himself at the centre of a group of his acquaintances dressed in false names and noses. The main character is a young British diplomat posted in the 1960s to Berlin where he falls romantically and credibly in love with a German girl, Suzi...

[The Junkers is an ambitious novel and inevitably leaves a] confused, fragmented impression as one realises towards the end of the book that the author has failed, honourably, in his task: that of attempting to give an artistic explanation of some of the Dionysian forces in the German collective psyche during the last forty years. Sensibly, Mr. Read has adopted as the framework for his novel the story of a single Pomeranian family, the Von Rummelsbergs…. (p. 75) [Mr. Read tells] the tale through the ...

The Professor's Daughter is a good fictional portrait of our American malaise. Here a father and his daughter find that their search for a meaningful cause is an oppressive condition. Their dilemma is that material wealth has deprived them of any social need. And this cunning, cynical tale suggests that our motivation for changing the status quo is frustrated by the freedom from want. (pp. 164-65) The narrative smoothly alternates between events in the lives of father and daughter, interweaving and u...

Breaches of etiquette come thick and fast in Piers Paul Read's The Villa Golitsyn, from insulting one's guests at dinner to talking about money—'it's too middle-class'—from drunkenness to incest and the seduction of a minor. Read has so many talents as a novelist that one is always expecting him to write a really first-class book and always feeling surprised as well as disappointed when he fails to live up to his promise. He is an entertaining storyteller. He...

Piers Paul Read's experimental novel [Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx] is an infuriating mixture of the trenchant and the perverse…. The novel spirals backwards—via satirical setpiece, heavenly interludes, jokes, straight fiction—to trace how revolutionary impetus was able to start up in the unpromisingly easy-osy conditions of Western Europe today. The devious irony at times cuts deep…. But pointful passages are out-weighed by ones whose only aim seems to be to annoy the c...

It is typical of Piers Paul Read that he should preface [A Married Man] with an Author's Note informing American readers about the difference in the English legal system between a solicitor and a barrister. Typical in that it recalls the generally sober, just-the-facts-please tone Read has assumed in previous novels like Monk Dawson and The Professor's Daughter, especially in the extended flatness of Polonaise. Read depends on the clarity and intelligence with which he states, rather than expl...

Stefan,… [the] unheroic hero [of Polonaise], is a writer thwarted by 'the unreliability of his characters'. He persuades himself that he is a Marxist, but when he tries to write about 'positive heroes', his carefully constructed puppets run amok and shock even him, their creator. He concludes that his 'muse', his creativity, 'is irony, undiluted irony'. He rejects communism because communists still believe in the perfectibility of the soul; the ...

Admirers of the spare, intelligent Monk Dawson may be disappointed by Polonaise, an unexciting academic chronicle-novel…. A leading theme is the slow evaporization of oh young men oh young comrades into disillusion, self-interest, patriotism, common sense. There is the familiar amiable, soft-fibred intellectual whose ineffective good intentions and minor talents compete with a feeble sadism and a mordant temptation to see Hitler as the uninhibited artist in action. The Poles tend to cherish self-absu...

Mr Read's non-fiction approach, as we know from Alive, is to surround large and shocking events with understated prose. It seemed to work well for such a lurid subject as cannabalism. It works rather well [in The Train Robbers] too: this is a clean, steady, authoritative narrative. But given the familiarity of the material, at times one finds oneself wishing for a cruder, heavier brush and stronger colours; for some English Mailer who, for all the risks of buffoonery and bad taste, might give one a k...

[In The Villa Golitsyn Mr. Read] skilfully infiltrates an air of menace, of intense unease, over the daily events that quicken towards the tragedy at the end. He juggles his characters with almost Murdochian dexterity: there's gambolling both hetero and homosexual; there's mystery, fear, banging shutters. But, except for Willy, it is hard to feel very much sympathy for any of the characters: often they seem to be mouthpieces rather than flesh and blood. This is not Piers Paul Read at his stron...

A year spent by [Piers Paul Read] in America seems to have tempted him into writing [The Professor's Daughter, a] low-keyed, unexciting account of the generation gap and revolution in American society. The approach—dutiful, lucid, schematic—simply does not match the theme, and the final liberal humanist retreat into a reactionary family-stability solution ('a family will always be the basic unit of society') hands us an old stone where new bread was never more needed. The ...

Technically, The Junkers is a fine achievement. Its agile handling of time-breaks gives it brisk coverage of half a century of intricate personal relationships, political complications and moral entanglements. The phrasing is bright, energetic; the craftsmanship, expert. Yet the overall effect is somehow diminished by the very characterization of the narrator. He simply isn't a storyteller who inspires confidence. Richard Sullivan, "Persons of Principle," in Book World ...