It is murderously precise and succinct. It contains, in its 108 pages, more levels and layers of experience than many books five times its length. The book centers on various overlapping triangles among a group of beings who are mostly, but not exclusively, human. It takes place during a single summer afternoon in the late 1920s in a French country house, where Alexandra Henry, the young American heiress who owns it, is entertaining an American house guest named Alwyn Tower, the book’s narrator. On this particular afternoon Alexandra and Tower are visited by the Cullens, a wealthy Irish couple who, in their ongoing and rather aimless travels, are en route to Budapest in a Daimler, driven by their young chauffeur. Larry Cullen is, or at least appears to be, the very image of the hale, silly aristocrat. His wife, Madeleine, is an aging beauty who has spent her marriage dragging her husband through one rough devotion after another, most of them involving radical Irish politics or the killing of some wild animal, and who appears at the château with her latest enthusiasm, a hawk she is training to hunt.
