"The drawing-room fire was somehow between times; its beautiful afternoon crispness and energy gone, and the logs which had been put on for after supper hissing steadily."
There's a lull in the middle of Elizabeth Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek, much like that dampened fire, and the stilling of the pace, the relative muteness of tone, is of a piece with the story itself which is one of love left to die down in youth only to be rekindled in middle age.
There is much to admire in this novel - its 'knowingness', for example, in that it seems emotionally very intelligent, very astute; there are its perfectly delineated supporting characters, and then at the heart of it, the progress of the weak, affected Vesey and Harriet, the young woman who accepts marriage to a man with whom she is not in love as the only option open to her, but invests in that nonetheless comfortable life nothing more than is necessary for convenience's sake.
It's a sad tale and one that seems informed by cynicism (or maybe just the human condition), but there's a lot of humour, too, and both the lighter-hearted and the more painful moments speak of keen observation and perception based on experience. I found it an intriguing book - unsympathetic but penetrating, convincingly staged but with an ambiguous ending. What did you think of it?
