Sarah is 65 and tormented by lustful desires directed at a vain, calculating young man. The situation is not poignant, it is ridiculous - or at least it could have been, had Lessing a sense of humour. When not mooning over the young man, Sarah spends much of her time examining her once wonderful body, which even she now concedes is surfaced with the fine velvety wrinkles of an elderly peach".
Sarah keeps company with an unsympathetic bunch of characters who could have escaped from an Iris Murdoch novel - and perhaps they did. That any writer would offer a 300-page report on the angry frustrations of an ageing, conceited woman who begrudges the young their beauty is difficult to grasp. This one-dimensional novel is not about love; it is concerned with ego and thwarted sexual appetite.
