The atmosphere of the story is a haze, its gaze is a glance; we see most of it through the brain of Dalton Foster, a man who has recently been released from prison after committing a paedophilic crime. Exactly what he did we do not know, because, as said, we are seeing this through him, and so his paedophilia is presented in the form of oblique romantic scenes. Foster swerves away from sex and around it, not in written arabesques like those of Humbert Humbert, but into memories that persist like questions: a live rabbit on a dining table, or his aunt dripping melted chocolate onto croissants and crying, "Voila!" Are we supposed to sympathise with Dalton Foster, this hopeful child molester? And if we did, what would we be sympathising with? Sex is a strange thing, neatness can't contain it -- Jolley sets her story in a boarding house where people are feeling desperate behind closed doors and if these people had lawns then ants would be ripping into one another underneath the grass-blades.

A convicted child sex abuser re-enters society ( )