Christopher Kennet has dined at the same Club for twenty-five years, his home is perfectly ordered, as is his marriage and indeed his solicitor’s practice with a trusty, home counties clientele. This life is to be roughly elbowed aside by the hard world his son Kit inhabits, and which Kennet is shortly to enter. It is the London of late-night Greek cafes, pimps, whores, braying students with long scarves, puffy-eyed girls, Woodbines and sharp men like Porcher and Katz.
Kennet suspects that Kit has been doing something extraordinary with the property of a valued client and knows he must find him: ‘Who are we,’ he thought, ‘my son and I and what are we doing?’ That question will lead him lonely and afraid into the shadowland of furnished rooms where attractive married women live disordered lives, and where the likes of Porcher and Katz pursue their dubious ends.
It is this sinister thriller of a middle-aged solicitor’s attempt to find his son and Kit’s own search for his father that Julian Symons has called one of the great forgotten novels of the fifties. Here is the John Mortimer compassion, the sharp pang of recognition and the delicate turn of phrase with an edge, as he shows us English society standing on the brink of transition.
