The Easter Party by Vita Sackville-West

I think All Passion Spent (which is one of my favourite books ever) constantly makes me expect too much of Vita Sackville-West's books. This one, like most of her other ones, is good but it's not that good, I don't think I'll remember it forever or anything. It's one of her later works (1953), but I didn't realise until about halfway through that it wasn't set in the 1930s, when they started talking about World War II. It's written very much in the style of a 1930s society novel (which I always enjoy), which seems really out of place in the 1950s. Strangely enough, parts of it reminded me a great deal of Iris Murdoch's writing; there is a rather over-determined situation in which one of the characters makes his brother give up his dog for experimentation, to teach him a lesson about being a human being and caring about something other than himself (he returns the dog unharmed at the end, obviously). A lot of the dialogue also seemed strained and unreal to me, and there might have been considerably more descriptions of the garden than I wanted to read (Vita Sackville-West is famous for her love of gardening, but I am left rather cold by horticulture). However, it was a solid interesting and somewhat unusual 'country house' type of novel, with a good cast of characters and a nice dash of nostalgia and wistful philosophizing.