through female personas, and he succeeds in showing Mrs. Ransome's gradual growth as a human being and disenchantment with her cosy, starched, pre-theft lifestyle. Bennett's irony gets many opportunities to manifest itself in this story, as does his ability to juxtapose incongruent ideas. His elegant writing style is littered with lavatories and dog excrament. When the Ransomes find an audio tape with two people having sex on it, Mrs. Ransome says "It sounds like custard boiling". The story's message seems to be a warning against suppressing the true self and not living life to the full. The latter part of the book is particularly scathing towards Mr. Ransome's stiff and awkward outlook. One suspects that Bennett is intervening, using the opportunity to attack pompous middle class behaviour. The climax is a poignant but positive ending to what is an amusing, moving and insightful story. Alan Bennett's writing so often reminds me of fractal forms; the twists and turns of his plots on the macro scale being matched perfectly on the micro scale by the endless convolutions of his individual sentences and paragraphs. There are times when his writing gives every impression of wandering aimlessly through a tangled mass of irrelevant side detail, with no possible single end point in mind, until suddenly, and with an almost shocking clarity, his words reveal themselves as carefully chosen after all, when they all unexpectedly lead plumb to centre of the narrative target that has been in his sights all along. I can see