Beryl Bainbridge has for a long time been on my list of authors I felt I ought to try out, since she's repeatedly shortlisted or winning various prizes. This is definitely one of the books where I do see that she's a very good writer, but I just did not at all enjoy the book. The characters are all sort of jumbled together and hard to understand, I had no sympathy for their motives at all. Bainbridge does convey the hectic, scattered atmosphere of a theatre very well, as well as the tangled and chaotic lives of the people in it, and the general slipshod, crumbling and extremely unstable world of post-War Britain. The novel is also very well-plotted and crafted with deliberate confidence, but I was really horrified by the ending (not that it's particularly scary), there's just something so pathetic and oppressive about it. The style and plot reminded me a lot of Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices, or something by Muriel Spark (though I like Spark better). There's a similar lack of traditional coherence, which is obviously deliberate (so I'm not saying that as a criticism), but is something I personally don't enjoy.
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