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Title: a lemon, in my view
Review: I have read many of her books, and was curious about this one, as it was the book famously rejected by Jonathan Cape for no apparent good reason, much to Mr. Larkin's horror. I am a fan, but when I read it, to my dismay I found it a very unpleasant book. The famous lightness of wit is quite absent, replaced by a turgid narrative about a group of sad unattractive characters, none of whom are even satirized, and for whom I felt nothing at all. Worse still, the Church, although always quietly present in her works, seems to have got such a grip on the writer's psyche, that she is unable to put together three lines without some reference to it, even when it is irrelevant to the action. My feeling is that she had come to the end of a long creative spell and needed a long rest. And this is what happened. When she returned to write many years later, she was a new person.Having said all this, I warmly recommend all her other books.
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