April 1961
Alexander Denham is the successful head of a feature agency which Fleet Street takes seriously. He is married to a neurotic German refugee, and they live with her father in Finchley. There are no children; he does no journalism, let alone write the plays and novels he once envisaged, and his wife is intolerable. In his work he is surrounded either by people who all talk about their dreams and ambitions as he used to talk twenty years earlier, or by his contemporaries who seem to have slipped into a kind of mechanical sensuality which he finds infinitely depressing. He makes an attempt to work on an assignment - going to Germany, and taking his wife. His wife walks out on him, and on his way back to England, he meets a girl on a train. It is not until all the structure of his life has fallen to pieces that he can leave out his dreams or self-criticism and continue quietly with the next event in his life.
This is a psychological and introspective novel, set in a convincing professional scene - the author has both feet on the ground, even if his toes are turned in, but although some of the writing here is good, I still don’t feel sure what he was driving at. That the wife’s neurosis should rest on imagination is a cliché of neurosis: I was not convinced of the reasons for the marriage in the first place, and as shown, it had become such an unbearable business, that the spectacle of the husband’s endurance - minus much pity or any love - was not an inspiring one.