Dinah Brooke

An unflinching auscultation of the diseased heart of the English middle/upper class circa the end of empire, tracing a very bad end back to denial of mother love and the spare the rod mentality. The brutality of it all is effectively evoked, especially from the infant’s POV, and there’s some squalid incidental sex thrown in for good measure. The narrative voice skitters around, occasionally dropping into an incidental character for a line or two, which somehow serves to tokenize them, and there’s a whiff of horny-handed veneration in Brooke’s contrasting of her fucked up main man with his well-adjusted working class navy pals. But this is an original, powerful, frequently disturbing novel well worth the reissue and well worth reading.… (more)