badgermind

Yes I did like it, rather to my surprise. In the edition I have the author is quoted as saying "I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language..." and that is what struck me most. I have never been able to tune in to the (literary) catholicism of some writers of that period, particularly Graham Greene, and I did find the novel rather too strongly catholic, as you put it, having myself moved over the years from anglo-catholicism to agnosticism to buddhism to paganism. I thought the peripheral descriptions of army and college life were well done. Reading the second half, I was more struck by the strange interactions of wealth, dysfunctional family relationships and religion...