Few writers have written as many variations on a theme as successfully and elegantly as Brookner. However, this story, which centres on yet another solitary heroine, widowed and now at the mercy of her late husband's relatives, is curiously flat. Never the most outgoing of individuals, Dorothea appears to have lived life at second hand and, now on her own again, is smugly content. Disaster strikes when her cousins by marriage inform her that their American granddaughter is getting married. They ask Dorothea to provide accommodation for the best man. This slight disruption to her routine assumes epic proportions. The potential comedy of a middle-class English lady harbouring an Americanised English gay house guest never quite works. Long a Brookner admirer, I found it dull and unconvincing.
