THE TWIN SERPENTS

Alexander Cranford, a brilliant, British, innovational plastic surgeon is dead but interest in him is revived on a Greek island where a writer (is he?) questions Wilson, a painter (is he?) about him. This then retroactively fills in Cranford's past, his marriage to Eve, hardly inseparable from her decadent twin brother (they personified Aesculapius' emblematic twin serpents), her death and now, on the island, Cranford's obligation to exchange his new life for a youngster's.... Extreme, if not exaggerated, circumstances grafted together smoothly enough to hold your attention even where they do not altogether earn your belief.