This is Warner's first novel, published in 1977, after her non-fiction works on the empress Tz'u-hsi and on the Mary-cult. I picked it up largely because I enjoyed Indigo (1992), but this is a rather different book, with an obvious kinship to writers like Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble. It's a straightforward, realist narrative, with three main point of view characters: the brothers Jerome and Gabriel Namier, and Jerome's daughter Paula.
Jerome is a minor north London literary figure, who has just discovered that the review he has been editing for many years has been secretly funded by the CIA, demolishing his intellectual credibility overnight. Gabriel is a Jesuit who is writing a book about a 17th century Jesuit missionary to China; Paula a book illustrator. All three are troubled in different ways by failure and loneliness.
The contemporary story tends to get rather eclipsed by the very vivid glimpses we get of Gabriel's research into the diaries of the missionary Andrew da Rocha. Warner threads together Gabriel's own doubts with the delicate problem the Jesuits faced in reconciling Christianity with Confucianism without alienating either the Chinese Emperor or the Pope.
There is a sense that Gabriel and Paula are the characters Warner is really interested in, and that poor old Jerome has been thrown in as a bit of a makeweight. And the subplot involving Jerome's wife, Teresa, doesn't really do much except give space for Warner to launch a few barbs at the Hampstead view of Vietnam.

Interesting, and probably worth a read if you like books with a lot of ideas floating around, but a bit dated now. ( )