Pace duly upped

I glided through At Lady Molly's last week - all rather effortless I thought and I feel we're really getting going - about time! I'm very pleased with the decision to move to three volumes in two months, and have moved straight into Casanova's Chinese Restaurant.

I am hugely gratified to see our narrator actually doing something. Art books have been replaced by film scripts, which looks like proper hack-work, and suggest that our narrator might not be able to prance around thoughtless of money forever. I definitely noted a few choice quotes that I promptly forgot to write down.

There is some real grit in this volume as well, and I think it captures the strange unreality of serious politics in the 1930s, Spain and a European war both get major mentions, though as signs of points of view, not with any urgency attached. The symbolism of the retired general who has read Freud & Jung - and I'm straying into pretension - is here potent, and funny.

In many ways, Widmers and Erridge dominate the book, as poles of aristocratic leftism and middle-class 'getting on'. However, while Widmerpool is clearly ever more memorable and blackly comic in this book, I wonder if he is overplayed here. The situation are becoming a little absurd and straining reality. I'm part of the way into Casanova and he seems to have receded - so much for the better I feel.

Still no female characters of substance.