Cahill is no historian, but he doesn't pretend to be. . . . What you do get in his books is a guided trek around the standard texts . . . Few novels are as unsparing as this one in presenting the ephemerality of love given the implacability of death, and few are as moving in depicting the undiminished achievement love nevertheless represents. His brand of black comedy is curiously tender . . . Robert Bingham will be missed.
Good satirists are hard to find, and a true gift for darkness is rare.