In the first part of the book poetic vision and narrative momentum combine to produce writing of dangerously beautiful intensity. It is hard to believe that Michaels can sustain such a pitch of exquisite sensibility, and so it proves. In the second, more inward-looking, section the prose becomes rhetorical; a declarative tendency develops; a preciousness taints the writing. The character of Lucjan seems curiously confected and symbolic. One has the disturbing sensation that this passage is part of a different novel, imperfectly grafted on to the earlier narrative.