Does Jomier approve or disapprove of these social changes? He debates the question with his alter ego, Dr Jekyll in conversazione with Mr Hyde. But which is which? In Stevenson's story, Mr Hyde is the dark side of Dr Jekyll — passionate and angry rather than sensible and scientific. But today's sensible and scientific Dr Jekyll would read the Guardian and favour sex as a recreation from the earliest age. It is the irrational Mr Hyde with his primitive superstitions who bundles sex with marriage, procreation and unromantic love.

Jomier inclines towards the position taken by Mr Hyde. He suspects that feminism has been an own goal for women. Men now get sex without commitment and women, once bankrolled by their husbands, neglect their children to join the army of unisex wage-slaves. Does this make Jomier a misogynist? He is aware that misogyny is one of the Seven Deadly Sins of the secular state, along with racism, homophobia, elitism, smoking, obesity and religious belief. There is a thought police out there looking for offenders among white middle-class Englishmen. Jomier can no longer afford to shop in Jermyn Street. Can he afford to say what he thinks? 

Jomier is innocent of faith and fatness and he no longer smokes. But is he a racist? Can one be a racist without knowing it, like the carrier of a disease? What is a racist? How is racism to be defined? Is it a mere awareness of the race or nationality of others? A preference for one race or nationality over another? Jomier likes the courteous Indians or Pakistanis who sit behind the counter in the newsagents and sub-post offices across London and dislikes the West Indian youths who saunter around in flash trainers and baggy trousers and mug and stab and drop chocolate-wrappers and pizza boxes in the street. But Jomier's prejudices have nothing to do with the hue of human skin. Of all the ethnic groups in Britain, he likes least, the sullen, sarcastic, shaven-headed, white van-driving, uneducated, Sun-reading, indigenous estuary English. 

Git Lit historians and anthropologists tell us that there was a time when communities looked to the village elders to make judgments on the grounds that the old were more likely to be wise. For some time now, it has been "youth to the helm". Focus groups of young people tell politicians what they should do, and we now have a Prime Minister and Chancellor the same age as Jomier's son and daughter. And all are children of their time. They do not question the post-Christian zeitgeist. The changes in manners and morals that have taken place in Jomier's lifetime are assumed to be both immutable and good. 

But are we better off than before? Is the liberated Briton happier than his or her repressed forefathers? The author hides his hand. Psychologically poleaxed by his divorce, his protagonist Jomier considers these questions but comes to no conclusion. His moral and cultural horizons are now limited to the screen of his Panasonic Viera television. A depressing scenario, perhaps, but as the critic William L. Grossman said of Machado de Assis, the creator of Brás Cubas whose posthumous memoirs I mentioned above, his pessimism appeals to many religious persons, "perhaps because, by destroying so many false gods, he leaves room for none but the true".