I first read this book a couple of years ago, and had been looking forward to re-reading it ever since. Well, it was worth the wait.

This is a wonderful book. The story concerns Michael Owen, a writer, who's been commissioned to write a history of the dreadful Winshaw family. The book's title is a reference to the eponymous film which Michael saw as a child. Scenes from the film continue to haunt him, and resonate through the whole story.

The narrative alternates between episodes in Michael's life and passages (from his book?) which describe individual Winshaws. It becomes increasingly clear that the Winshaw family is directly and indirectly responsible for many of the problems Michael has encountered through his life, and Michael's (and the reader's) slow realisation of this is one of the things that keeps you turning back to earlier passages in order to re-read them in the light of new discoveries. Like "House of Sleep", there are many threads running through the book and it's difficult to summarise in a way that comes anywhere near doing justice to the novel's construction.

In one sense, the book is an angry diatribe against Thatcherism - much of the story takes place at the end of Thatcher's reign - and the Winshaws themselves are stereotypically selfish, greedy and unscrupulous: their professions include merchant banker, arms dealer, tabloid columnist and factory farmer. It's quite satisfying to see them portrayed in such an unflattering light, while at the same time frustrating that they appear to prosper.

But it's also a romance. It's not just about Michael's love for Fiona, the girl who's his next-door neighbour, but about the wistful lost-ness of his past, which we get flashbacks to: the seeming innocence of these episodes is challenged as we gradually discover more about their significance to the overall story.

And it's also very funny, laugh-out-loud in places.

The only weak point in the book is the end sequence: I can see why he did it this way, and I'm not sure how else it could have ended satisfactorily, but I don't feel it worked as well as the rest of the book. But this is a very minor flaw in a fantastic novel, and I look forward to reading it again.

Completed : 23-Feb-2004