Basically, Hartley's novels seem variations on the Bildungsroman, the traditional novel of quest for selfhood. In each a more or less sensitive, perhaps slightly neurotic protagonist … undergoes some part of the inward journey from innocence through experience to higher innocence, in a setting documenting one of the crucial moments in recent history: the beginnings of the century and life among the country houses of the Edwardian era; World War I; English society in between-the-wars Venice; World War II; the Welfare State and the crumbling of the class system; the post-World-War-III future. (p. 9)

Hartley is an explorer of our own age, not a gentle fabler of the past. At his best he asks more questions than he answers; he tries to let us experience in microcosm and think about the dilemmas and contradictions and polarities of living when and where we live. With the protagonists we sway between imaginativeness...