Gertrude is assisted in looking after Guy by Anne Cavidge, an old friend who has recently left the nunnery she had entered fifteen years earlier.

The Tim-Gertrude affair and subsequent marriage is the heart of the book, and it is a good study of class relations and the younger man-older woman romance.

Tim is both a hero and a colossal screw-up, but he is also kind and lets Gertrude’s friends run him down because it doesn’t bother her and he still gets to be with her at the end of the day.

There is a fair amount of treachery and coincidence in the novel, but the heavy touches are softened by consequences which Murdoch lets play out in natural time.

There are symbolic rocks, rugs, birds, an orchestra of china monkeys, a patch of cliff that looks like 'a head wearing a crown', its brow creepy with vines and its cheeks weepy from a hidden spring, things like that.

Joyce himself, in a letter, described it as 'a namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy ... style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles.

A (rhetorical) question of Anne's, I take it, puts into words the conscious informing sentiment of these novels: 'Can anyone who has had it really give up the concept of God?