Word: vanborough
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Joseph Smith, a diffident, conscientious young man with moist hands and an awkward, absent-minded manner, was head gardener at Wotton Vanborough. In this subtly cockeyed novel so much is clear from the start. And his master, Sir John, was the son of a courtly rake whose adventures in the Edwardian era had burdened a number of titled matrons with offspring of discreetly doubtful parentage. One of the doubtful ones was Diana Haddon, now twentyish and one of London's brightest young things, at the moment dallying innocently with Sir John's young affections. There was also...
...book begins with Joseph nervously putting last touches on the Wotton Vanborough exhibit. With this scene as its casual centre it launches into a circling recital of upper-crust extravagances and lower-class problems, mixed, its methodical madness suggesting nothing so much as a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Marcel Proust. Proust and Waugh have at bottom much the same chillingly precise appreciation of high-flown decadence, and the combination of their two techniques here serves the author very well. Waugh-ish are the incidental plot and background, which largely describe the scurryings from London to Paris to the Lido...
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