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More a tour de force than a solidly creative work, with its strongest passage the long and really remarkable description of Joseph's emotions at the symphony concert, the book is likely to baffle those readers who search beneath its discursive surface for significances deeper than it contains—will delight many others with its suave philosophy, its grave absurdities, the considerable skill its 30-year-old first-novelist author displays in the conduct of its curiously bifocal narrative.
Author James knows well the general field he writes about. Well-born and wealthy, godson of Edward VII, he was hardly down from Oxford before he was startling fellow-Londoners: 1) by reports of his magnificence during a year at Rome in the consular service, where he rented the huge Palazzo Orsini, employed a string quartet to play for him at meals; 2) by his marriage (1930) to Dancer Tilly Losch; 3) by the series of sumptuous modernist ballets he staged (1933-34) in London and Paris for her and other stars. Through the staging of these he met most of the modern composers and painters, played a youthful Maecenas to many, is now a particular friend of Surrealist Salvador Dali—of whom he complains only that Dali and his cronies "don't believe in God."