Salley Vickers' first novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, was joyously received last year. Here is her second, with a more abstract notion to the title and a more intricate and contemporary theme. Because the earlier book was as much a love song to Venice as a story about the flowering of an elderly English spinster and because it had reverberations of James and Wharton and Forster it had immediate international appeal. This one, a very English book, set near Turnham Green and the Hogarth roundabout (The Hogarth Roundabout might have been an amusing title!) may well not be 'globally' understood, though not necessarily the worse for that.
As in Miss Garnet, the subject now is Catholicism, eternity and the problems of human desire, and the women are by far the strongest characters. They are also younger - there is childbirth - more self-confident and better dressed. One verges on Mayfair! And though Salley Vickers is still, thank goodness, allusive about the sexual act she is more specific about the ravages of sexual appetite.
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