Bowman is a successful editor and this bookish novel is filled with subtle allusions and literary anecdotes, from Byron's death in Greece and Lorca's execution in Spain to Pound's incarceration in a madhouse and Hemingway's description of gangsters in "The Killers". Bowman has a wide acquaintance and there's a Tolstoyan profusion of characters, most divorced and many alcoholic. Delineated in a few striking phrases, they make brief but vivid appearances and then vanish.

Salter's style is pure and elegant, his dialogue sophisticated and witty. One indolent character has "the handsome face of someone who had never done much". "Photos from the summer curling" suggest couples curling up in the summer. A friend asks Bowman, "‘Whatever happened to that sultry girl who was having an affair with your rich father-in-law?' ‘He died, you know.' ‘It was that intense?'" 

Salter's descriptions of weather and animals recall the best of Hemingway: "It had snowed before Christmas but then turned cold. The sky was pale. The country lay silent, the fields dusted white with the hard furrows showing . . . The foxes were in their dens, the deer bedded down."

There's a fine account of a dangerous, near-fatal swim in the ocean: "The bottom was gone, his foot could no longer touch it. He fought against the panic. He was rising and falling in the swells, the waves thundering."

The novel ends with an oneiric meditation on time, death and memory that echoes the epigraph: "everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real." Art is life perfected, captured and rescued from time. Like Thomas Hardy, Salter, in his late eighties, has continued to write well and produced an impressive work of art, a worthy successor to A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years.