Reading in Bed, By Sue Gee

Dido and Georgia, elegant 60-year-olds and lifelong friends, inhabit a comfortable and stimulating world of lovely gardens, good food, Radio 4 and Farrow and Ball. We encounter them at the Hay Festival, urbanely discussing Pinter and Lessing, before going their separate ways, "Dido to York, and Jeffrey; Georgia to London, and an empty house". Henry, fourth side of a quadrilateral comradeship solid since Oxford, has died a year since; his absence pervades the book. Grief has intruded on this world of profound security, and no one quite knows what to do with it.

Georgia, alone with her cats in a house full of memories, still talks to Henry. Chloe, her daughter, a stylist working on photoshoots for plush magazines, copes by drinking a lot, having the odd good cry, and trying not to think too deeply. One feels that a good old primitive ritual of wailing and tearing of hair might have cleared the air a little. But in this cultured and seamlessly benevolent world, grief is always unresolved. The darker side of life is not unknown: at a dinner party we meet "the professional and concerned: a therapist, a radical lawyer aproaching retirement, two doctors whose surgery is filled with the hollow-eyed and wasted". But it's all been at one remove till now.

In York, Dido's equilibrium is about to be equally shattered by loomings of a serious illness, and a dreadful revelation concerning Jeffrey. Theirs has been a good marriage, with two children; Kate a doctor, Nick a historian. Watching her grandchildren scamper in the garden, Dido observes that they are "the children of the intelligentsia". Surely mortality and disaster cannot intrude here? It can, of course, and does.

Books have been crucial in the lives of these people. Reading in Bed is a fond tribute to the joys of reading and teems with literary references. Companionship is a couple reading in bed together. Bookish discussion has been one of the main bonds in the four-way friendship. Strange, Dido reflects in hospital, how one's reading tastes change in times of crisis: "What she needs is comfort, and comfort, in modern fiction, is perhaps in short supply." She goes back to The Wind in the Willows. Henry, while dying, turned to the Russians, and Wordsworth.

In a staunchly secular world, these sophisticated people cannot help but worry away at the void. Jeffrey, entering the warm forgiveness of his family, gives thanks then wonders what he's thanking. Georgia, encountering a beautiful horse on a hill, is struck by wonder and feels for one moment that "all is well and all this lasts forever". But there are no life-changing revelations. Sue Gee writes subtly and deftly, observing with a wry and sympathetic eye, and the result is far from depressing despite the nature of the material. This is a hugely enjoyable and rewarding read.

Carol Birch's novel 'The Naming of Eliza Quinn' is published by Virago

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