That We Might Never Meet Again
Philip Robinson, Faber, £10.99
The artist, his wife, her lover (who is also the gardener), the childlike probably-daughter of the lord of the manor; oh, and the cook -- That We Might Never Meet Again is the work of an Irishman, and is set on what seems to be a Scottish estate, but it feels as English and as mannered as a film by Peter Greenaway. The elaborately sculpted, sometimes overworked prose makes enigmatic a sequence of betrayals that in any plainer handling would read like melodrama.