I enjoyed this book a lot and read it inside four days. But it's not as good as the others of his that I've read. I get the impression that both he and Rose Tremain (see my review of Trespass below) were exhausted by the intensity of the imaginative effort they put into their previous novels and decided on far more enclosed scenarios this time.
For Blake Morrison the setting is a country-house weekend - but for contemporary middle-class folk. All the main characters are in their late 30s (I think). Out of the blue Ollie (a barrister) invites Ian and Em, an old university friend and his wife, to spend the August Bank Holiday weekend with him and his partner, Daisy. Ollie and Daisy are wealthy and successful, Ian and Em are a lot poorer. The complication is that Daisy was Ian's girlfriend at university until Ollie ousted him in her affections, and Ian still has the hots for her.
Apart from some flashbacks the action takes place in and around a run-down holiday cottage in Suffolk, where - to Ian's annoyance - they're joined not only by Ollie and Daisy's teenage son, but by one of Daisy's work colleagues and his two little girls.
The narrator is Ian. But he's not only an unreliable narrator, he's really self-deluding and - we come to realise - a nasty piece of work. By the time we come to that conclusion, however, Blake Morrison has very cleverly got us hooked.
A dramatic (melodramatic?) story develops and I'm pretty sure you'll keep turning the pages like I did.
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