Book review: The Dark Circle by Linda Grant

LINDA GRANT’s novels may be useful to future sociologists seeking to flesh out the details of life at particular times and places in British society. 

Her last book Upstairs at the Party looked at a kind of Brideshead bunch of college chums but transposed from 1940s to 1970s England and the new era of polytechnics. In her latest deep immersion in English society Grant goes back almost as far as Evelyn Waugh’s time and looks at the years immediately after World War II. Not alone is the time very particular but so, too, is the place, a TB sanatorium.

If that sounds like a bleak setting there is a vitality in the writing as a wide spectrum of characters is brought to life. Grant focuses her literary eye on a country in the aftermath of war, licking its wounds. Soldiers returning home — and the country generally — are facing into the depths of the psychic wounds of years of war.