[Union Dues] is a bleak story, relieved only by occasional flashes of humour in the dialogue and by the (not wholly credible) possibility that Hunter may marry a sympathetic widow. It is also very much a book of the 1970s: which is to say that it reviews the 1960s as someone with a bad hangover might consider his binge the night before, applying to that decade the old-fashioned value judgments that prevail today. The cops are no longer pigs, though they do get a bit cheesed off now and then. The older generation, matured by their experience in the Second World War, care about their kids, in an inarticulate sort of way, and make the best of a bad job at work. By contrast those of the younger generation who have been to war have been unmanned by it, while their noncombatant contemporaries are stridently articulate and care...