BOOK REVIEW / As light as prawn's whiskers, n'est-ce pas?: 'A Period of Adjustment' - Dirk Bogarde: Viking, 15 pounds

THIS IS Dirk Bogarde's fifth novel, a sequel to Jericho, although it may be read quite independent1y. The minimal plot covers four months in the life of the narrator Will Caldicott, who is intended to be a moyen homme sensuel but emerges as a dim, selfish and conniving blimp. Caldicott inherits his brother's property in Provence and takes on the care of his own 10-year-old son, a responsibility he has hitherto avoided. His wife, a naughty vamp, has left him for a 'not frightfully savoury gentleman, big in commercial television', taking their daughter with her.

Caldicott doesn't care. With the support of friends and neighbours he embarks on his new life, gardening, drinking and outwitting those who would stand in his way by various forms of bribery and blackmail. His complacency and self-regard are unshakable, and his attitude curious indeed. On his brother's death from Aids he comments: 'He had succumbed entirely to depravity and died from the loathsome spores which his passions had spawned.' A Down's syndrome child is described as 'ill-born', 'unseeing', an 'animal'. He is perhaps at his most grotesque in his relations with women: 'I had become aware and sympathetic to that overwhelming oddity in women, the arbitrary, unexpected, often wild, mood swings.' But these frail hysterics do have their uses: singing in the kitchen while preparing the narrator's supper; listening to the narrator's problems and admiring his way of tackling them; tying the narrator up with silk cords on a rubber sheet and marvelling at his willy - 'Heavens to Betsy] That is all a wicked girl can desire.' I hadn't realised that anyone apart from Jeffrey Archer still wrote this sort of stuff.

A few messages are filtered through. It's fine to cheat and lie as long as you aren't caught. Children are a big nuisance. It is important to own property. Aids is a punishment for vice. The French are greedy, snobbish and corrupt and they talk in a funny way. At first I thought that Bogarde's intention must be satirical, but alas it clearly is not.

Caldicott constantly refers to the great changes which are taking place in his life, but these are circumstantial only. There is no evidence of spiritual, emotional or intellectual development. The few other characters are equally wooden, and they converse with staggering banality. Most of the time people speak French, and this is rendered literally: 'Oh la la. We are to be lectured is it?' However, the narrator is able to express himself in normal language, thus asserting his effortless superiority. The natives are given to sudden cries of 'Ouf', 'Boff' and 'Malheur'. The women wear mocking smiles and fiddle incessantly with their hair; they all spend a lot of time waving things above their heads. The narrative is occluded by pointless detail and the style is dire, veering between the arch and the laboured: 'I had very little idea how the reconstruction of what they had achieved should be done.'

There is densely applied local colour, but most of the action takes place on a series of interchangeable terraces against the 'clatter and clash of the bamboo and bead curtains, whispers in the sweetness of the afternoon'. Odd, that, but really no odder than the existence of this sorry and embarrassing tale. I must just mention that the femme fatale has cascading auburn curls and fingers 'as light as a prawn's whiskers'. Ouf. Boff. Malheur.