Teresa Waugh

An avalanche in a French ski resort is thought by some to have been caused by American warplanes flying low in order to refuel on their way to bomb some hapless Balkan country. This is the first clue to one of the main themes in Diane Johnson’s L’Affaire: the dislike, mistrust and misunderstanding of all nations for one another, the unlikelihood of living in harmony with foreigners, the ingrained prejudices of even supposedly intelligent people and the impossibility that ever the twain should meet. Unfortunately Johnson makes no allowances for the quick-wittedness of her reader, so she lays it on not so much with a trowel as with a sledgehammer.

The heroine of Margaret Drabble's new novel is on first sight pretty depressing, and supposed to be so. The opening part of The Seven Sisters is in the form of Candida Wilton's diary, written from the time she moves to a modest flat in London after the break-up of her marriage. Despite her incongruously glamorous name, she is the middle-aged, discarded wife of a headmaster from Suffolk. Her children, whom she doesn't like, are grown up and have, surprisingly, sided with their father in the divorce. She has very little money and, apart from being a headmaster's wife and bringing up her three daughters, her only work has been filling in to teach the occasional French lesson. This presumably explains why she maddeningly peppers her journal with the interpolation 'en effet'.