Review
Bryan Forbes, the British motion picture director, has written a novel about another motion picture director, Dick Warren, in an urbane, honest if somewhat self-indulgent, disenchanted but hopeful first person. This concerns a threefold phase of the middle years of his life after he returns to London. To Susan Hart, his more than one role-playing actress-wife since their marriage exists only by virtue (?) of tacit deference, habit, and default. To Alison whom he had loved passionately ten years ago and loves passionately again although she is now married so that the renewed affair gutters out in the cliche of stolen hours and the secondhand circumstances of a borrowed apartment. And to the making of a film under, and sometimes in spite of, a gross Hollywood producer whose motivated duplicity is all part of this world of galling bitchiness, shafted betrayal and "well-delivered insincerity." This is the kind of novel which should attract the readers of say the later John Braine - superficial but with the kind of sleek professionalism which makes it, as they say around here (meaning something else again) one of those open options. It's a romantic entertainment frosted with a certain realism. They're not around too often any more than their visual counterparts, caught in the pincer action between the art and commercial flick. (Kirkus Reviews)
