A novel that could have done with editing to remove the repetitive flab, but nonetheless interesting. It’s about family life/husbands/sons around the time of the 1938 Munich Agreement (although the tone sometimes seems positively Victorian or Edwardian). Two contrasting families live side by side in a degentrifying square in “Upper Radstowe” (Clifton), the Frasers and the Blacketts. There’s a lot going on: Mr Fraser has abandoned his large family; Mr Blackett is unwittingly a monster of smug self-centredness; Mrs Blackett has honed a carapace of detached acceptance, but it has come at a cost:

They had each lived in a mean little world, his of self-satisfaction, hers of pandering to it for her own amusement and hers, she feared, was the meaner.

Ouch! Neither is a bad person, but traditional marriage – male authority, female deference – has warped both of them into twisted shapes. Mrs Fraser – husbandless but with happy memories of her marriage and ready to embark on another loving relationship – is a bit of a cliche of life-affirming femininity. To complete the options open to women, we also have the unmarried woman: Miss Spanner, who has also been through the family mangle – this time the handle turned by her chisellingly strict parents (now mercifully deceased). The slight chance of a happy marriage is represented by Mrs Fraser’s daughter.

Like Dorothy Whipple, Young is very good (if prolix) at portraying people’s inner lives. What doesn’t work so well is her preoccupation with the previous and coming wars. (And why couldn’t she just use proper nouns rather than allude to Hitler and the Sudetenland, I can’t fathom.) The older men have been affected by WWI: Fraser’s temper, Lindsay’s body and Blackett’s amour propre at having avoided it. The younger men – sons and son-in-law – will be called upon to risk their lives in the next. Characters presented sympathetically are against appeasement; those like Mr Blackett are relieved at the Munich Agreement – but, again, there is too much of it. There is a parallel in the final pages between Mrs Fraser’s lack of action in bringing her marriage to an end, the Blackett’s uneasy truce and the country’s postponement of action that will have to be taken – but I’m sure there was a shorter route to The End.

In its depiction of the Blacketts’ marriage, this book reminded me a little of A Lady And Her Husband: the self-effacing wife and the self-satisfied husband.