Mr Scott has a remarkable gift for atmosphere and character; he can turn the screw as subtly as Henry James, but with a sardonic virility from which the Master would have shrunk. The brooding house called Aylward, alive with its ghosts and memories; terrible Mrs Hurst, the gin-sodden maternal spider lurking in its recesses, obsessed with her dead son; Rex Coles, shiftly yet endearing, with his Thurberish apothegms on women – there is a quality about their portrayal which recalls the great Victorians, and marks Mr Scott out as a novelist of quite unusual powers.