A ticklish book to market, dealing as it does with murder, suicide, Catholicism, Atheism, and so on. Morbid, perhaps. And yet absorbing reading, a good picture of a novelist who did not practise what his novels taught, and who never outgrew the gestures of rebellion: of a dying wife, who feared, but knew no words to pass on her warning; of a son who learned nothing by his father's method of education; of a daughter, who learned too much.